Abstract
AbstractThis paper attempts a comprehensive account of ‘fibre medicine’ elaborated by iatromechanists from c. 1700 to c. 1740. Fibre medicine, a medical theory informed by the notion of the fibre, has been neglected by medical historians despite the pivotal role played by the fibre in animal economy. Referring to a wide range of medical fields such as anatomy, physiology, pathology, therapeutics and life sciences, this paper elucidates the ways that the fibre serves as an indispensable concept for iatromechanists to establish their medical theories. This paper also highlights the metaphorical dimension of the fibre as an integral part of fibre medicine. In re-evaluating the concept of the fibre, this paper seeks to redress the neuro-centric view of eighteenth-century medicine, and attempts to locate the fibre body amidst the fundamental shift from humoralism to solidism.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
History,Medicine (miscellaneous),General Nursing
Reference148 articles.
1. See H. F. Augstein (ed.), Race: The Origin of an Idea, 1760-1850 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996)
2. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982). Charles White, a disciple of John Hunter, in his An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables (London, 1799), appropriated Camper's theory of facial angle to the racial hierarchy of human race (134 and passim).
3. Short, op. cit. (note 44), 63–4.
4. See on this point Barker-Benfield, op. cit. (note 42); and Rousseau, op. cit. (note 3).
5. Cheyne, op. cit. (note 18); Blackmore, op. cit. (note 72), 90.
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