ABSTRACT
In a letter of 1637, Descartes, then forty-one, writes that he has less leisure than he once had, since ‘the white hairs that hasten my way are warning me that I should not study anything but how to slow them down’.1 The Discours, published that same year, had already proposed that ‘if it is possible to find a way to render men in general wiser and more able than they have been until now, I believe that it is in Medicine that one must look for it’.2
Writing to the Marquis of Newcastle a few years later, Descartes goes so far as to say that ‘the conservation of health has been at all times the principal end of my studies’.3 That, no doubt, is hyperbole. But even if it would be too much to call Descartes’ philosophy a medical philosophy through and through, there is no doubt that the preservation of human health was one of its chief aims.
