Conférences du Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) (automne 2024)
Le Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) organise régulièrement des conférences sur l’histoire de la médecine, où les sciences occultes peuvent jouer un rôle.
30 septembre 2024 (17h) : « Medicine on the Margins of Colonial Mexico: Galenic Pharmacy in Home-Made Remedies » par Paula De Vos (San Diego State University)
In my study of Galenic pharmacy, I have argued that this tradition developed over a series of stages, one of which involved its transport to the Americas under the Spanish Empire. Its presence in the thoroughly Hispanized cities of central Mexico, I have argued, conformed closely to the Galenic tradition.
But what about medical practice outside the urban centers of New Spain? How did Galenic pharmacy fare in the largely indigenous rural areas of the Mexico’s altiplano region and beyond?
As the Spanish colonial establishment spread beyond the urban environment, setting up encomiendas, hospitals, mines, presidios, and missions outside the colonial core region, how did the Galenic tradition interact with the Nahua and other indigenous medical traditions and pharmaceutical practices already in place?
In this paper, I explore a series of texts of “rustic medicine” containing recipes for home-made pharmaceutical remedies that could be prepared in places “where there is no pharmacy.”
These texts were authored largely by religious friars from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century and incorporated both indigenous and Galenic ideas, materials, and practices.
Though indigenous materia medica constituted a significant part of the tradition, nevertheless, the majority of medicines were Galenic, transplanted from Afro-Eurasia and subsequently appropriated within this rustic tradition and still utilized in modern curanderismo (healing practices).
8 octobre 2024 (17h) : « The Wonders of Gastroscience in Rabelais: A Few Galenic Salvos from the Renaissance » par Guido Giglioni (University of Macerata)
Neuroscience is a philosophical enterprise that cannot completely sever its ties with Descartes’s physics. By contrast, Galen’s science of natural faculties has been gradually banned and forgotten by neuroscientists.
Now that our knowledge of gastrointestinal biome has reached a level of sophistication previously unimaginable and that the neural network regulating the intestinal tract has become familiarly known as the ‘second brain’, it may be worth recovering some aspects of the Galenic legacy.
I intend to do this by exploring and commenting upon some Galenic loci in Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, one of the most brilliant doctors operating during the Renaissance.
Anatomy is central in Gargantua and Pantagruel and such notions as food, growth, digestion and natural faculty are an integral part of Rabelais’s neo-Galenic project.
22 octobre 2024 (17h) : « The Human Body according to al-Farabi: An Image of the Cosmos and a Model for the Virtuous City » par Cecilia Martini Bonadeo (University of Padua)
Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, al-muʿallim al-ṯānī or “the second master” of the Arab-Muslim philosophical tradition after Aristotle, presents the physiology of the human body in his Epistle on the Refutation of Galen Concerning That in which He Contradicts with Aristotle Regarding the Parts of the Human Body (Risāla fī l-Radd ʿalā Ǧālīnūs fimā nāqaḍa fīhi Arisṭūṭālīs li-aʿḍā al-insān).
This treatise, which is edited in Arabic but not yet translated into a Western language, presents the physiology of the human body in the context of a discussion of the relationship between physics and medicine and the position of both disciplines in relation to Farabi’s epistemology.
In addition, al-Fārābī devotes chapters 11 and 12 of Section IV of the Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Perfect City (Mabādiʾ ārā’ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila) to the discussion of bodily functions.
In this treatise, man is presented as a microcosm, and the study of the parts of his body – his limbs, his organs, with special attention to his reproductive organs – and the body-related functions of his soul are fundamental to the understanding of the macrocosm and its intelligible principles.
Like the cosmos, the healthy human body displays a hierarchical organization, a model for the political order of the virtuous city. The lecture will introduce al-Fārābī’s physiology and idea of medicine through commented readings from these works.

5 novembre 2024 (17h) : « Non-Human Animals and Ancient Medicine: A Shared History in the Constitution of Medical Knowledge » par Marco Vespa (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

18 novembre 2024 (17h) : « Galen on Contagion and Material Immagination: A Reading of “On Problematical Movements” » par Brooke Holmes (Princeton University)
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Jean-Charles Coulon (25 septembre 2024). Conférences du Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) (automne 2024). Le monde des djinns. Consulté le 22 juin 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/12ci1