ABSTRACT
The practice and findings of experimental anatomy constituted the most significant sixteenth-century advances in medicine, but these discoveries made little impact upon professional thinking until very late in the seventeenth century, and they hardly affected the popular idea of the body until the eighteenth (Maclean (1980), pp. 28-9). Regardless of such accurate anatomical descriptions as those of the Italian Andreas Vesalius (1543) or such discoveries as William Harvey’s of the circulation of the blood (1628), the dominant cultural ideas of the period continued to construe the human body in terms of its constituent ‘humours’, as the Middle Ages had done. The names of the ancient physicians Hippocrates and Galen continue to be invoked throughout the seventeenth century, with a reverence ‘difficult now to understand’ (Eccles (1982), p. 17; Siraisi (1990), p. 84; see also Laqueur (1990), pp. 151, 170, 265-6, and Temkin (1973) pp. 134-92 for the durability of Galenic medicine). They are still being adduced in the 1690s, in a period we too blandly think of as predominantly rational and scientific, long after that key event in the history of modern science, the founding of the Royal Society in 1662.
