[Archimedes] Testimonies: States of Mind and States of the Body in the Early Modern Period Volume 57 ||

This book reconnects health and thought, as the two were treated together in the seventeenth century, and by reuniting them, it adds a significant dimension to our historical understanding. Indeed, there is hardly a single early modern figure who took a serious interest in one but not the other, with their attitudes toward body-mind interaction often revealed in acts of self-diagnosis and experimentation. The essays collected here specifically reveal the way experiment and especially self-experiment, combined with careful attention to the states of mind which accompany states of body, provide a new means of assessing attitudes to body-mind interactions just as they show the abiding interest and relevance of source material typically ignored by historians of science and historians of philosophy. In the surviving records of such experimenting on one’s own body, we can observe leading figures like Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, deliberately setting out to repeat pleasurable, or intellectually productive moods and states of mind, by applying the same medicine on successive occasions. In this way we can witness theories of the working of the human mind being developed by key members of an urban culture (London; interregnum Oxford) who based those theories in part on their own regular, long-term use of self-administered, mind-altering substances. It is hardly an overstatement to claim that there was a significant drug culture in the early modern period linked to self-experimentation, new medicines, and the new science. This is one of the many things this volume has to teach us. Acknowledgments Contents About the Contributors Chapter 1: Editor’s Introduction Chapter 2: Lisa Jardine: A Life in the Margins Bibliography Chapter 3: Dosing the Ailing Subject: Reconnecting Early Modern Health and Thought Bibliography Chapter 4: Francis Bacon’s Body and His Experiments on the Prolongation of Life 4.1 Bacon’s Body 4.2 The Prolongation of Life 4.3 Experiments 4.4 Conclusion Bibliography Chapter 5: Material Thoughts: Robert Hooke’s Theory of Memory 5.1 Time and the Human Moment 5.2 Memory and Reason 5.3 Unnatural Man: The Relationship Between the Senses and Knowledge 5.4 Memory and Philosophical Practice 5.5 Conclusion Bibliography Chapter 6: Making Sense of Pain: Valentine Greatrakes, Henry Stubbe and Anne Conway 6.1 Greatrakes, Witnesses and Interpreters 6.2 Anne Conway 6.3 Stubbe and the Conway Circle Bibliography Manuscripts Primary and Secondary Sources Chapter 7: Animal Bodies and Human Minds: The Anatomy of the Brain and the Analogy of Nature 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Animals and the Analogy of Nature 7.3 Dissecting the Brain Before the Seventeenth Century 7.4 Cureau de la Chambre and Animal Cognition 7.5 Chanet’s Critique and Cureau de la Chambre’s Reply 7.6 Stensen and the Anatomy of the Brain 7.7 Willis and the Analogy of Nature 7.8 Conclusion Bibliography Chapter 8: Lockean Self-Diagnosis 8.1 Locke’s Distinctions Between Soul, Understanding and Self 8.2 Locke’s Distinctions Between Masses of Matter, Man and Self 8.3 The Self and the Understanding 8.4 Self-Diagnosis and Other Selves 8.5 Conclusion Bibliography Chapter 9: Joseph Glanvill on Imagination, Method and the Art of Thinking 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Gross Apprehenders and the Immortality of the Soul 9.3 The Causes of Our Errors: Logical, Medical and Skeptical Diagnoses 9.3.1 Logic Physicalized 9.3.2 Enthusiasm, Melancholy and Dogmatism 9.4 Method and the Freedom of Inquiry 9.5 Conclusion Bibliography Chapter 10: Treating Yourself: Self-Diagnosis Amongst Natural Philosophers and Physicians and the Early Modern Medical Case Study 10.1 The Case of John Wilkins 10.2 The Case of Martin Lister 10.3 The Cases of John Ray 10.4 Conclusion Bibliography Manuscripts Primary and Secondary Sources Index