[SydPhil] HPS Research - Laura Sumrall - A Strange Guest: The Demonological Framing of the Pathological in Helmontian Medicine

[Debbie Castle]

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 LAURA SUMRALL
POST GRADUATE CANDIDATE
HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
A Strange Guest: The Demonological Framing of the Pathological in Helmontian Medicine


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In 1630, the faculty of theology at the University of Louvain condemned the work of the Flemish physician Jan Baptista van Helmont (d.1644), concluding that, in his natural philosophy, “the activity of God, nature, and the devil cannot be distinguished.” Van Helmont’s divisive medical perspective was rooted in the natural magic of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, through which he sought to expand the purview of human efficacy in the natural world by redefining the limitations of both. Central to his challenge to established medicine was his reorientation of medicine to the essential knowledge and cure of diseases; in the process, van Helmont produced a concept of disease as a truly existing ens both dependent upon and unnatural to human nature. This, I argue, was originally a demonological insight. In debates over medical authority and disease etiology, van Helmont turned to an intellectual consideration of demonic power in which he delineated the natural through the unnatural, forming a concept of the pathological that framed his theory of disease. Self-proclaimed Helmontian physicians who later took up van Helmont’s theory of disease therefore inherited a concept of the pathological originally formulated in answer to questions concerning demonic power and the boundaries of natural action. This talk will focus on my PhD thesis, which explores the participation of esoteric knowledge in early modern scientific development through the works of van Helmont and his English followers, whose practices were shaped by his medical perspective even as they divested his corpus of the demonology with which he originally justified his medical reform.




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