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Extra resources for Jean Fernel's On The Hidden Causes of Things: Forms, Souls, And Occult Diseases In Renaissance Medicine (Medieval and Early Modern Science)

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109 It is very hard to find opponents of judicial astrology extending their arguments, however, to dismiss the foundations of the more philosophical astrology to which Fernel, Kepler, and most other érudits subscribed. It is difficult to imagine what they might have said in response to Kepler’s point, for example, without embroiling themselves in serious heterodoxy about the nature of God. ” After all, Fernel does not attempt to describe the precise effects of planetary positions (conjunction, opposition, trine and the like); his concern is not to show exactly what the astrological effects are, but merely to demonstrate that they must be playing a role in life processes,110 including some diseases, which – remember – Fernel sees as having a life of their own, being real entities and not merely epiphenomena of an unbalanced temperament.

The Divine, and Secondary Causation in the De abditis rerum causis Fernel’s “Dialogue” is divided into two books. In keeping with Aristotle’s suggestion that physicians “who exercise their art philosophically take their departure from what concerns nature,” the first book is concerned almost exclusively with natural philosophy, and the second with medicine. 87 At the outset it looks as though the major focus of concern might be the relationship between medicine and religion. Philiatros initiates the proceedings, gathering the speakers together, because he wants to know the answer to a question posed by Hippocrates: “may 86 Nutton, “Reception of Fracastoro’s Theory of Contagion,” p.

71 Inadequate discussions in the ancient authorities, meant that it was difficult to understand the nature of contagion and its relationship to miasmas or corrupt exhalations in the air, which were generally held to be the causes of contagious diseases. It was in an attempt to understand these and other epidemic diseases that both Fracastoro and Jean Fernel entered this debate. ” On Paracelsus, see, for example, Walter Pagel, Paracelsus. The lively debate on contagion is noticed in Nutton, “Seeds of Disease,” p.

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