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HPS1000H Week One Reading Response

Quinn Harrington
09/15/2014

In Medicine and Society in Medieval Europe, 500-1500, Katherine Park asserts
that traditional histories of medieval medicine misleadingly present the field as
fundamentally fragmented; these histories suggest that medical practitioners of the
period adhered to highly localized and often incommensurable theories determined
by restrictive conceptual foundations and the particularities of practitioners
specific patients (i.e., gender and social class) (Park 1992, 60). Though Park admits
that medieval medicine did exhibit a degree of disunity (particularly in its earliest
stages), her aim is to demonstrate the existence and strengthening of what she
terms a cultural unity tying together the work of medieval medical scholars and
practitioners (Park 1992, 60). Park is intentionally sensitive to the social history of
medieval medicine through the development of this argument (Park 1992, 60), and
considers the role of particular socioeconomic and religious influences of the period
on the formation of what she presents as a relatively unified medical order
emerging between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries (Park 1992, 60).
In the other Park text included in the weeks reading selection, Observation in
the Margins, 500-1500, the author examines the behaviour of medieval scholars of
natural philosophy more generally. Her specific focus is on the historical
relationship between two categories historically considered comprising what is now
generally referred to as scientific observation: experience and observation (Park
2011, 16). She succinctly describes the relation between the categories in question
and the actual behaviour of medieval scholars towards the end of the article:
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observational knowledge, she suggests, was the product of generalization over
broad sets of carefully collected empirical data, while experiential knowledge was
arrived at through the examination of and deduction from particular cases (Park
2011, 36). Importantly, she highlights the relative absence of knowledge derived
from observational practices in mainstream natural philosophical until the sixteenth
century (Park 2011, 37), a fact that signals a significant shift in the priorities and
methodologies of natural philosophy as a whole towards the end of the medieval
period.
Owen Hannaways Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science examines a
similarly dichotomous relationship traditionally thought to guide behaviour of
medieval natural philosophers, namely between philosophical work categorized as
contemplative and active. Drawing from the histories of prominent medieval
natural philosophers Tycho Brahe and Andreas Libavius, Hannaway explores the
relationships between the thinkers respective views on ideal scientific
methodology, the relationship between scientific inquiry, its practitioners, and the
communities in which it was practiced, and the physical environments in which
scientific inquiry was carried out. Importantly, Hannaway suggests that it would be
problematic to assume that Libavius and Tychos divergent opinions regarding the
proper social role of natural philosophy resulted directly from the nature of the
fields they studied (primarily chemistry and astronomy, respectively (Hannaway
1986, 610). Rather, Hannaway suggests that the methodology adhered to by these
thinkers, evidenced in the structure and layout of their respective workplaces, was
decided in large part by their personal attitudes towards scientific inquiry.
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Though Hannaways article touches on the topic of medieval patronage in his
discussion of the financing of Brahe and Libavius workplaces, Mario Biagioli
undertakes a more thorough discussion of patronages influence on natural
philosophy in Galileos System of Patronage. Specifically, he considers the influence
of patronage on Galileos beliefs and scientific activity. For Biagioli, Galileos patrons
heavily influenced his work and the beliefs he held (Biagioli 1990, 44); from an
historiographical perspective, the article cautions the reader to avoid falling into
anachronistic modes of thought and retrospectively rationalizing historical
figures beliefs when socio-cultural factors, patronage specifically in this case, might
have played a significant role in their determination.
In the closing paragraph of Biagiolis article, the author explicitly references
a theme that is bound up in the discussions taken up in each of the texts: the gradual
shaping of identities closely related to medieval natural philosophy. Parks text on
Medieval medicine discusses the shaping of the identities of the concept of illness,
treatment, medical practitioner, and the notion of medicine itself. Her discussion of
experience and observation in medieval natural philosophy not only probes the
development of the respective identities of these two categories of contemporarily-
termed observation, but also of natural philosophy as a whole in her description of
the more prominent role and strengthened epistemic status of observation-derived
knowledge. Hannaway considers identity in a powerfully holistic sense his
examination of the relationship between Brahe and Libavius scientific
methodology, social priorities, and physical environments questions the status of
scientific methodology and rationality as an epistemic foundation. Finally, Biagiolis
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article considers both the shaping of the identities of natural philosophers (Biagioli
1990, 45), and more generally the identities of the beliefs and attitudes they held,
evidenced in particular by his categorization of Galileos Copernican beliefs as an
explanandum rather than an explanans (Biagioli 1990, 44).

Discussion Questions
Might there be a connection between the pragmatic flavour of Libavius civic
humanism, as presented in the Hannaway text, and the pragmatic aspects of the
concept of observation discussed in the Park text?