July 2007 Newsletter, Vol. 36, No.3
Guggenheim 2007
Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Director of the Indiana University Center for the History of Medicine, is working on a project titled “Microscopy, experiment, and disease: Marcello Malpighi and his world.”
"The main reasons to focus on Malpighi are his key role in the anatomical world of his time and the breadth of his publications and interests..."
My aim is to complete a book using Marcello Malpighi as a probe or a lens to explore the intellectual horizon of his time; therefore the book has an unusual structure, neither an intellectual biography nor a history of 17th-century anatomy. Rather, it consists of a series of studies in which Malpighi is a constant fixture, while each of them analyzes his work in relation to that of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries, from Harvey and Descartes to Steno and Swammerdam. The main reasons to focus on Malpighi are his key role in the anatomical world of his time and the breadth of his publications and interests, from the study of the microstructure of all the major organs to the problems of generation and organization of the living body, from the anatomy of insects and plants to medical practice.
Iconography plays a central part in my project. Different techniques of investigation led not only to different forms of understanding structures and processes, but also to specific forms of visual representation: iconographic styles associated with mechanistic anatomy, microscopy, and injections, still await critical analysis. The new anatomy led to an art of representation quite different from that traditionally found in anatomical texts: rather than seeking realistic or life-like representations, mechanistic anatomists often used images instantiating and explicating their conceptual schemes.
While anatomy and natural history are central to my project, my aim is considerably broader. Overall, current historiographic accounts of the 17th century portray anatomy in isolation from the physical sciences, philosophy, and even medicine.
Experiment, for example, has been overwhelmingly associated with the physical sciences, ignoring not only that some of the most significant 17th-century cases concerned anatomy, but also that many anatomical experiments were performed in collaboration between anatomists and physico-mathematicians; these collaborations call into question demarcations having more to do with disciplinary affiliations among historians than with 17th-century practices.
The new anatomy addressed in a new fashion philosophical problems of the interaction between the soul and the body. The study of the operations of the brain and sense perception, the role and location of the soul, and the role of the faculties are fundamental problems in anatomy and philosophy alike. Only recently have historians started to explore these interconnections between anatomy and philosophy more thoroughly, yet the works by Malpighi and his contemporaries in this area still await a comprehensive critical examination.
Medical themes too are in need of fresh analyses. Often anatomy has been treated in isolation from therapy and medical practice more broadly, despite the fact that, on the one hand, anatomists from Malpighi to Richard Lower were also physicians who applied novel anatomical findings to understand disease and, conversely, they relied on medical practice for their anatomical investigations; those relationships were mutually enriching. Pathology is an especially relevant area at the intersection between anatomy and therapy: its study sheds light at the same time on anatomy and the understanding of disease.
