Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance

How or what were doctors in the Renaissance trained to think, and how did they interpret the evidence at their disposal for making diagnoses and prognoses? Maclean addresses these questions in the broad context of the world of learning: its institutions, its means of conveying and disseminating information, and the relationship between university faculties. The uptake by doctors from the university arts course - the foundation for medical studies - is examined in detail, as are the theoretical and empirical bases for medical knowledge, including its concepts of nature, health, disease and normality. Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance ends with a detailed investigation of semiotic, which was one of the five parts of the discipline of medicine, in the context of the various versions of semiology available to scholars. From this survey, Maclean makes an interesting assessment of the relationship of Renaissance medicine to the new science of the seventeenth century.

• The second in an acclaimed sequence of Renaissance studies, by one of the most formidably learned historians of ideas in the world • Major contribution to the history of medicine and the transmission of medical ideas • Massive, pan-European range of reference, and appropriate pan-European sales potential

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Notes on the text and its modes of reference; Introduction; 1. Learned medicine 1500–1630; 2. The transmission of medical knowledge; 3. The discipline of medicine; 4. The arts course: grammar, logic and dialectics; 5. The arts course: signs, induction, mathematics, experientia; 6. Interpreting medical texts; 7. The content of medical thought; 8. The doctrine of signs; Postscript; Bibliography; Index of names and terms.

‘… a sine qua non for all historians of medicine …’ History

\'… to fail to read this book would be to ignore one of the most original contributions to the intellectual history of medieval and Renaissance medicine in recent years.\' Isis

\'In this important book Ian Maclean has opened up what for many medical historians is one of the most abstruse and difficult areas of Renaissance medicine.\' Renaissance Studies

\'Maclean\'s book contributes to our appreciation of the vitality of the late Renaissance intellectual world.\' The American Historical Review

\'This is a dense, rewarding and remorselessly intelligent study of a neglected aspect of European learned culture written by one of the most original early-modern intellectual historians currently working.\' History of Universities

\'… provides Renaissance historians and historians of science and medicine with a valuable addition to our picture of early modern intellectual life.\' Journal of the History of Medicine