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Full Description
Reevaluates Nicolaus Steno's contributions to anatomy and early modern science, examining his interdisciplinary interests in their historical context.
Nicolaus Steno (1638-1686) was a renowned anatomist in his lifetime. He reformed the anatomical understanding of glands, argued that the heart was a muscle, renamed the so-called female testicles as ovaries, and developed a mathematical model for understanding muscle contraction—discoveries that were fundamental to the fields of anatomy and physiology. However, other aspects of Steno's life have come to define him: his claim that mountains' strata reveal the history of the Earth and his conversion to Catholicism as a practicing scientist. This excessive attention to his geological discoveries and to asking whether science and religion are compatible, Nuno Castel-Branco argues, has obscured his significant accomplishments as an anatomist. The Traveling Anatomist thus restores Steno to his rightful place as a crucial figure in early modern science.
Using Steno's extensive travels as a framework, this book depicts him as an active participant in the Republic of Letters. Castel-Branco traverses Leiden, Paris, Copenhagen, Florence, and Rome as he follows Steno in his sojourns through different scientific academies, courts, and artisanal workshops. There he developed new friends, some of whom were women, with whom he researched and exchanged ideas. Drawing on Steno's books, correspondence, and novel archival material, Castel-Branco invites us to approach Steno and his accomplishments in anatomy, mathematics, and geology through the eyes of his contemporaries. Doing so, Castel-Branco reconstructs the rich and overlapping worlds of scientific disciplines that shaped Steno's work, revealing the richness of interdisciplinary research in early modern intellectual life. And through Steno, he illustrates larger developments and new networks of significance in mid-seventeenth-century science. By focusing on ideas, scientific genres, institutions, and friendships, Castel-Branco offers a way others might also productively study science from the early modern period until today.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Introduction. The Various Travels of Nicolaus Steno
The Worlds of Traveling Scholars
The Intersection of Disciplines
Mathematizing the Body
Across the Roads of Europe
One. The Uses of Chaos; or, What Did Nicolaus Steno Know?
The Cathedral School, Mathematics, and Goldsmithing
Travels, Note-Taking, and the Making of "Chaos"
A Pious Search for Certainty and Focus
Post-Harveian Anatomy at the Center
Learning Interdisciplinary Methods
Two. The Making of a Scholarly Anatomist
Authorship and the Blasius Controversy
The Historia of the Glands
"The Pen Following the Knife": The Making of a Scholar
Three. Dissecting with Numbers, Machines, and Mixtures
The Mathematics and Mechanics of Glands and Muscles
The (Non-Cartesian) Epistemology of Nicolaus Steno
Observations in Practice: The Lymphatics Controversy
Galen, God, and Gassendi
The Mechanical and Chymical Worlds of the Netherlands
Four. In the Cradle of the Académie des Sciences
Monsieur Stenon, a Sçavant Danois in Paris
The Académie de Physique de Caen
Breathing Physico-Mathematics: The Friendship Between Steno and Swammerdam
The Benefits of Being Anti-Cartesian
Five. Anatomy and Mathematics at the Medici Court
Travels Across the Networks of Florence
The First Italian Month: Dissecting and Searching for Certainty
Mathematics Mattered in Rome
Intersecting Muscles with Mathematics in Florence
Friendships, Patronage, and the Accademia del Cimento
Six. Thinking the Earth with the Body
The Delayed Manuscript
Comparisons in Anatomy
Comparisons in Earth History
The Search for Certainty in Anatomy
Models in Anatomy
The Search for Certainty in Earth History
Models in Earth History
Seven. Anatomy of a Conversion
Religious Conversions in Seventeenth-Century Europe
Friendships, from Collaboration to Conversion
The Search for Certainty in Religion
Steno and the Devout Women
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
