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Browsing by Subject "Paracelsus"

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    Iatrochemical healing in Shakespeare and Donne: the diseased and cured body in the English Literary Imagination, 1590-1638
    (2013-04) Larkin, Christopher Ross
    English authors near the beginning of the seventeenth century explore and exploit tensions between traditional Galenic and newer Paracelsian models of contagion and cure. Medicine is both a subject and a metaphor. Shakespeare and Donne are skeptical about medicine's ability to cure. They treat new ideas cautiously yet allow room for the potential utility of chemical medicines and modern anatomies. Shakespeare engages the Galen-Paracelsus debate in All's Well That Ends Well, ultimately presenting an alchemical female healer superior to both schools. Comparison with King John and The Merry Wives of Windsor reveals Shakespeare's move away from traditional humoral medicine so satirized in the period toward a newer medicine based on chemical models of contagion and cure. The later plays then drift away from the debate toward concepts of cosmic sympathies. Donne's poetry and prose works demonstrate a medical understanding of the ailing body that allows him to test and exceed the boundaries of both metaphor and the human body. Attention to anatomical detail provides Donne with rich imagery for exploring his complex personal brand of dualism. In the ecstatic writings, including Ignatius His Conclave and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Donne shows complicated condemnation and exaltation of chemical medicines as both physic and metaphorical vehicle. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis presents a utopian quasi-scientific community that includes explicit research facilities for chemical medicines. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy demonstrates the limitations of humoral medicine and explicitly encourages laboratory alchemy for the production of nonorganic medicines.
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    Philosophical Saltpeter: The Origins and Influence of Gunpowder Technology and the Paracelsian Aerial Niter
    (2019-01) Washa, Quincy
    This thesis re-appraises how the creation and inclusion of niter theories and salt principles played into the reformation of early modern scientific philosophies, suggesting that the adoption of these theories by major figures of the period calls for closer attention by historians of science. In particular, it raises the question of why and how such a humble, earthly mineral took on a supernatural role and became a staple in some of the leading scientific philosophies of the early modern era. I show that salt, or more specifically saltpeter, would not have assumed this identity without the growing importance and popularity accorded to gunpowder weapons beginning in the Renaissance. It was the hermetic alchemist, Paracelsus, who first developed a metaphysical notion of saltpeter and incorporated it into his natural cosmology. Historians of science, such as Allen Debus, Walter Pagel, and Henry Guerlac, have discussed Paraclesus’ first claim to treatment of niter theories and their association with the observed effects of gunpowder. However, I argue that additional evidence, found in Paracelsus’ writings, is needed to further demonstrate this historical connection and to identify differences in the understanding of Paracelsus’ conception and employment of salt as one of three principles of matter, alongside sulfur and mercury, together forming his celebrated tria prima. An examination of the parallel rise of gunpowder weapons and the utilization of saltpeter as their principle source of power showcases the philosophical links between science and emerging technologies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The transition of saltpeter from a primary component in a technological instrument to a conceptual manifestation of the fundamental structure of reality reflects an epistemological transfer of concepts from craft knowledge to metaphysical and philosophical beliefs. Such narratives may help us understand the development of early modern natural philosophers’ beliefs about causality, agency, and creation.