Week 6 - Medieval and Renaissance Bodies

Transitional Period - Medieval

• The 5th century

• Fall of the Roman empire (476 CE) → much ancient medical knowledge lost in Europe

• Superstition, religious authority, and magic fills in the gap

• Greek & Roman texts survive in only fragments

Ancient Body

• Part of nature, governed by universal principles (humours, four causes)

• Illness = imbalance of material substances, not punishment or mortality

• Anatomy and philosophical inquiry encouraged

• Body idealized in art & science

• Heal the body by restoring balance

Medieval Body

• Vessel for the soul (immortal), inherently sinful or corrupt

• Body seen as mortal, and can die

• Illness = punishment, sin, demonic forces

• Theology first: soul’s primacy over flesh

• Body as a site of spiritual and moral drama

• Heal the soul as much as the body

The Grotesque Body

• Not ugly or disturbing

• Way of imagining the body (seeing the body as things that go in and out, seen as permeable)

• Body seen as open → open to spiritual and social forces

• Open, bulging, leaking

• Spills into the world, animals, and other bodies

• Mouth, belly, bowels front and centre

• Always becoming: Eating, birthing, dying

• Collective, excessive, earthly

Environmental Porosity

• Humours rise and fall w food, air, weather, and the stars

• Skin as a net: Open to bad air and toxins

• Treatment = rebalance the humours by controlling what enters and leaves the body: Sweating, bloodletting (nicking a vein), and purging (forcing ppl to vomit)

Spiritual Porosity

• Body, soul, and world: Permeable boundaries

• Spirits, demons, and divine forces could enter or influence the body

• Intense emotion or sin could make you sick

• Rituals, relics, and holy places protect and purify the body

• Vulnerable, but also in communion

• Health = Constant movement within and between self, others, and world

Monist

Mono = one

Universe cannot consist of more than one thing

Rabelais (1483 - 1494 - 1553)

• French late medieval / early Renaissance writer and physician

• Known for vivid, comic depictions of the “grotesque” body → wrote comedy books

• Humour as therapeutic

• Double entendre → Fluids of body + laughing

Grotesque body in Rabelais

• Openness + focus on the “lower stratum” → “dirty parts of the body”: Mouths, bellies, genitals

• Ties us to the material world: Eating, drinking, defacating, giving birth, sex

• Always becoming (bulging, devouring, excreting, transforming) → physical & social renewal

• Unfinished, excessive, porous: Constantly exchanging with the world and other bodies

Classical Body

• Closed, smooth, finished

• Body ends at the skin

• Open hole hidden; head & torso on display

• Still, balanced, timeless

• Individual and ideal

• Bosh

Islamic Golden Age (8th - 13th c.)

• Persian scholars preserved and extended the Greek medicine Europe had lost

• Translated, synthesized, and advanced Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen

• Greek knowledge arrived through direct contact and wider exchange

• Greek, Italian, and Persian scholars worked together.

Avicenna / Ibn Sina (980 - 1037 c.)

• Cannon of Medicine: Hippocratic clinical methods + Aristotleian philosophy + Galen’s humours, plus original insight

• Observation and logic → Careful clinical practice and the search for causes of illness (etiology)

• Translated into Latin → Foundational in Renaissance European medicine

• Bridge from Ancients to Renaissance

Human Anatomy

• Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) → “On the fabric of the human body”

• Beginning of modern Western medicine and medical imaging of the body

• New technology for “seeing” the body: reproducible woodcuts

Vesalius (1514-1564)

• Pioneering Flemish anatomist and physician

• Dissected human cadavers (Galen mostly dissected animals) → corrected Galen’s errors

• Detailed illustrations of unprecedented accuracy

• Transformed medicine and how we understand the body

The Clinical or Medical Gaze

• Michael Foucault (1926-1984), philosopher and historian of medicine

• The birth of the clinic: Late 18th c. medicine reorganizes knowledge “in-depth” → gaze penetrates physical truth

• Separates the patient’s body from the patient’s person (identity) → dehumanizing