Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine

by Ian Maclean

Overview

This is a major work by Ian Maclean exploring the foundations of learning in the Renaissance. Logic, Signs and Nature offers a profoundly learned, compelling and original account of the range of what was thinkable and knowable by learned medics of the period c.1530-1630. This is a study of great significance to the history of medicine, as well as the history of European ideas in general.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521806480
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/08/2001
Series:	Ideas in Context , #62
Pages:	430
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.14(d)

About the Author

Ian Maclean is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and Titular Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Oxford. His many publications include The Renaissance Notion of Women (1980), Montaigne (1982), The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals (edited, with Alan Montefiore and Peter Winch; 1990), Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (1992) and Montaigne: Philosophe (1996).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Notes on the text and its modes of reference; Introduction; 1. Learned medicine 1500–1630; 2. The transmission of medical knowledge; 3. The discipline of medicine; 4. The arts course: grammar, logic and dialectics; 5. The arts course: signs, induction, mathematics, experientia; 6. Interpreting medical texts; 7. The content of medical thought; 8. The doctrine of signs; Postscript; Bibliography; Index of names and terms.

Editorial Reviews

In a companion to his 1992 , Maclean (Renaissance studies, U. of Oxford) is concerned with the extraction of sense from words and signs in medicine, and the rules used to regulate such extraction. He draws on writers whose modes of thought and expression were widely known in the medical community, though they may not be well known now. His emphasis is less on recovering intention from words than on the practice of drawing deductive inferences from complex evidence. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

"...an excellent guide to the labyrinth of sixteenth-century medical opinions and controversies." Renaissance Quarterly

"It is certain to be standard...a brilliant performance." Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

"[T]o fail to read this book would be to ignore one of the most original contributions to the intellectual history of medieval and Renaissance medicine in recent years... This beautifully produced book will fundamentally change every reader's perception of Renaissance medicine and will no doubt shape the way the discipline is studied for many years to come." Cornelius O'Boyle, Isis

From the Publisher