Main description:

This edited volume explores the intersection of medicine and philosophy throughout history, calling attention to the role of quantification in understanding the medical body. Retracing current trends and debates to examine the quantification of the body throughout the early modern, modern and early contemporary age, the authors contextualise important issues of both medical and philosophical significance, with chapters focusing on the quantification of temperaments and fluids, complexions, functions of the living body, embryology, and the impact of quantified reasoning on the concepts of health and illness. With insights spanning from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, this book provides a wide-ranging overview of attempts to 'quantify' the human body at various points. Arguing that medicine and philosophy have been constantly in dialogue with each other, the authors discuss how this provided a strategic opportunity both for medical thought and philosophy to refine and further develop. Given today's fascination with the quantification of the body, represented by the growing profusion of self-tracking devices logging one's sleep, diet or mood, this collection offers an important and timely contribution to an emerging and interdisciplinary field of study.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: The More the Years the Less the Food: Alvise Cornaro on The Sober Life (1558).-Chapter 3: The Quantification of Talents: Education, Galenic Humoralism, and Classification of Wits in Early Modern Culture.- Chapter 4: Quali-Quantitative Measurement in Francis Bacon's Medicine. Towards a New Branch of Mixed Mathematics.- Chapter 5: Sanctorius's Weighing Chair: Measurement, Metabolism, and Mind.- Chapter 6: The Rise of Quantitative Biology in the Cartesian Age: the Theories of Preformation.- Chapter 7: "Nature is more subtle than any mathematician": Giorgio Baglivi on Fluids in the Human Body.- Chapter 8: "The Human Body Should Be Investigated in All Its Details to The Most Precise Degree...". Leibniz on Quantification in Medicine.- Chapter 9: Data vs Mathesis: Contrasting Epistemologies in some Mechanizations and Quantifications of Medicine.- Chapter 10: The Pulse Watch and the Physician's Senses: John Floyer on the Quantification of the Body.- Chapter 11: Against the Quantification of the Living: Hegel's Critique of Romantic Naturphilosophie in the Phenomenology of Spirit.- Chapter 12: Measuring the Mind: The French Debate on Fechner's Psychophysics in the Late 19th Century.