La médecine de l'esprit

Early Modern Medicine of the Mind


30 – 31 May 2014


Organised by: Sorana Corneanu (University of Bucharest), Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute) and Charles Wolfe (Ghent University)


Venue: The Warburg Institute (for directions click here)

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Speakers will include: Fabrizio Baldassarri (Università di Parma), Fabrizio Bigotti (Warburg Institute), Davide Cellamare (Radboud University Nijmegen), Annalisa Ceron (Università del Piemonte Orientale), Sorana Corneanu (University of Bucharest), Claire Crignon (Paris Sorbonne), Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute), Angus Gowland (UCL), Lionel Laborie (Goldsmiths), Gideon Manning (Caltech), Pieter Present (Ghent University), Kathryn Tabb (University of Pittsburgh), Koen Vermeir (CNRS, Paris), Catherine Wilson (University of York/Rice University), Charles Wolfe (Ghent University) and John P. Wright (Central Michigan).

The idea of the cure and care of the soul, seen as parallel or complementary to the cure and care of the body, became increasingly popular in the early modern period, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It is certainly not by accident that such phrases as ‘medicine of the soul’ and ‘medicine of the mind’ were often used in a wide range of therapeutic contexts. The workshop intends to explore the extent to which early modern ways of curing and caring for one’s soul can be seen as a bridging category that functioned across a number of interrelated disciplines (natural and moral philosophy, logic, medicine and theology). The following are some of the questions that will be at the centre of our discussions: Can such phrases as ‘medicine of the mind’ and ‘medicine of the soul’ be given firm conceptual and historical definitions? Can they be taken as evidence that patterns of medical thinking were being imported into the domain of moral and theological discourse, or that the opposite trend was in fact taking place?

We propose to reconstruct the early modern project of the ‘medicine of the mind’ in its shifting, sometimes conflicting iterations: from Renaissance articulations of humoural medicine with philosophical or theological cures of the soul, through seventeenth-century attempts at rethinking the relationship between the two medicines, of the mind and of the body, to eighteenth-century medical-philosophical developments which adopt increasingly materialist positions.

Programme


Click here to see the abstracts


DAY ONE - 30 May 2014

10:00 - 10:15 Registration

10:00 – 10:40 Chair: Sorana Corneanu (Bucharest)

Guido Giglioni (Warburg): ‘If you don’t feel pain in your body, you must have lost your mind’: The fortunes of a Hippocratic aphorism through the early modern period


10:40 -11:00 Coffee

11:00 – 12:20 Chair: Koen Vermeir (CNRS)

Annalisa Ceron (Piemonte Orientale): Leon Battista Alberti’s medicine of the mind: A glance at the Theogenius and the Intercenales

Davide Cellamare (Nijmegen): Too many meanings for one word: Spiritus in the work of Philip Melanchthon


12:20 – 13:20 Lunch


13:20 – 14:40 Chair: Angus Gowland (UCL)

Fabrizio Bigotti (Warburg): Galen's legacy and the transformation of natural philosophy in the late Renaissance: From mens to ingenium

Koen Vermeir (CNRS): The culture of ingenuity: Reforming the mind at the turn of the seventeenth century


14:40 – 15:00 Coffee


15:00-16:20 Chair: Guido Giglioni (Warburg)

Angus Gowland (UCL), Religious melancholy and the afflicted conscience

Sorana Corneanu (Bucharest): Things not in our power, and what to do about them; or, an inquiry into why there is so much body in the late Renaissance medicine of the mind


16:20 – 16:40 Tea


16:40 – 18: 00 Chair: Gideon Manning (Caltech)

Fabrizio Baldassarri (Parma): From the Passions of the Soul to the medicine of the mind: Descartes physician of Elisabeth

Pieter Present (Ghent): ‘To recover some degree of those former perfections’: Robert Hooke’s ‘universal cure of the mind’ and his regimen of self-medication


18:00 Reception



DAY TWO - 31 May 2014

10:00 Doors open


10:00 - 11:20 Chair: Charles T. Wolfe (Ghent)

Gideon Manning (Caltech): Directing the mind while preserving the body: Tschirnhaus’ Medicina mentis et corporis

Kathryn Tabb (Pittsburgh), Locke’s medical associationism and the treatment of persons


11:20 - 11:40 Coffee


11:40 - 13:00 Chair: Noga Arikha (Paris College of Art)

Lionel Laborie (Goldsmiths): Medicalising enthusiasm in eighteenth-century England and France

John P. Wright (Central Michigan): Mind, brain and scepticism: The rejection of the life soul in eighteenth-century Scottish medicine


13:00 - 14:30 Lunch


14:30 – 15:10 Chair: Catherine Wilson (York)

Charles T. Wolfe (Ghent), From medicina mentis to materialist philosophy of mind: A problem of naturalization?


15:10 – 15:50 Discussion

Moderators: Charles T. Wolfe (Ghent) and Catherine Wilson (York)



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