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This book explores the importance of bodily fluids to the development of medical knowledge in the eighteenth century. While the historiography has focused on the role of anatomy, this study shows that the chemical analyses of bodily fluids in the Dutch Republic radically altered perceptions of the body, propelling forwards a new system of medicine. It examines the new research methods and scientific instruments available at the turn of the eighteenth century that allowed for these developments, taken forward by Herman Boerhaave and his students. Each chapter focuses on a different bodily fluid - saliva, blood, urine, milk, sweat, semen - to investigate how doctors gained new insights into physiological processes through chemical experimentation on these bodily fluids. The book reveals how physicians moved from a humoral theory of medicine to new chemical and mechanical models for understanding the body in the early modern period. In doing so, it uncovers the lives and works of an important group of scientists which grew to become a European-wide community of physicians and chemists.
List of contents
1 Introduction.- 2 Savouring Alchemy.- 3 The Nature of Blood.- 4 Piss Prophets and Urine Matters.- 5 Crying Over Spilt Milk.- 6 Sweat it Out.- 7 Semen in Flux.- 8 Conclusion.
About the author
Ruben E. Verwaal is NWO Rubicon Research Fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, and curator of the medical collections at the Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam. He specialises in history of early modern science and medicine, material culture, and critical medical humanities.
Report
"Verwaal's book builds on these studies and adds to this growing body of work new insights about the complex interdependence between physiological theory and the diverse chemical practices developed in relation to medicine during the early 18th century. ... Verwaal's book offers extremely readable descriptions of medical research practices in the early 18th century, which are in fact too little researched to this day." (Barbara Orland, Nuncius, Vol. 38 (3), November, 2023)
