Descartes' Bones (3 page)

And that was establishment medicine. There were many other options that were considered valid. A sufferer from fever or stomach pain or gout or nosebleed might get, by way of professional service, an astrological reading, an amulet to be tied around the neck with a ribbon, or a squinty examination of his or her urine (“uroscopy” was looked to as a general indicator of health, as when Shakespeare's Falstaff asks a page, “What says the doctor to my water?”). The person administering the attention might be a physician, but astrologers and other sorts of healers were often seen as on a par, and some of the most esteemed medical men, including members of the College of Physicians in London, used astrology as part of their diagnostic tool kit.

Often, the caregiver was a clergyman. In any event, the procedure would have a religious cast. Illness and health were almost universally related to being in or out of God's sight, and the language of healing was shot through with theology. It was commonly held that medicine would work only if a prayer was offered to unlock its powers. Relying on physical remedies alone was often seen as downright ungodly: in England, Puritan minister John Sym advised “caution” that people
“dote not
upon, nor
trust,
or
ascribe too much
to physical means; but that we carefully look and pray to God for a blessing by the warrantable
use
of them.” To do otherwise—to rely on a physic or powder alone—would be to put the material above the spiritual. That was why a strictly mechanical approach to medicine was considered dangerously atheistic.

Now, it must be said that millions if not billions of people around the world today subscribe to beliefs similar to those of Sym: that the physical and the spiritual—pills and prayers, as it were—are both necessary components to health. They visit specialists and get diagnostic screenings, and at the same time they meditate and pray and ask God for a miracle cure. And these people don't exactly inhabit the inner recesses of the rain forest; they live modern lives. They are us. What's more, in the seventeenth century it wasn't only the premodern Aristotelians who held such views; so, for the most part, did the first generation of modern philosopher-scientists who reacted against them. So, too, did Descartes, who seems to have been as devout a Catholic as anyone of his time and whose whole mechanical account of the universe depended on God to hold it in place. The main challenge in following the story of Descartes' bones would seem to be understanding exactly what “modern” is. If it means a hard divide between the material and the spiritual, how do we account for the fact that both people of the seventeenth century who brought the modern sensibility into being and people today have managed to bridge this divide? We associate modern with a nonreligious, nonspiritual, purely rational and scientific outlook. Are we wrong to think that? If so, if it's a false divide, how did it come into being?

A partial answer is that when, in the early seventeenth century, the premodern worldview built around the received wisdom of the Bible and selected ancient writers began to come apart, and as dissatisfaction with it led to a conviction that the mind's latent strength could be brought to bear in radically new ways on the body's weakness, an inevitable result of the new approach was to give greater importance to the physical world and thus, however unintentionally, to devalue theological interpretations. Experimentation was not actually discovered by Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century, but what Bacon promoted in his
No-vum Organum,
which was published in 1620, was a commitment to reasoning based on observation of the natural world.

The most far-reaching application of this approach came with William Harvey's study of the human heart. Following Galen, the accepted thinking prior to Harvey was that the lungs pumped blood; that there were two kinds of blood, one that was made by the heart and another by the liver; and that both were continually used up by the body. Harvey's dissections and calculations convinced him that the vast quantity of blood that was pumped out of the heart every minute couldn't possibly be consumed by the body. The bold theory he published in 1628—that the blood circulated continually throughout the body, that the heart was the central pump, and that the liver did not make blood—was not instantly adopted by one and all. Harvey anticipated hostility—“I tremble lest I have mankind at large for my enemies. . . . Doctrine once sown strikes deep its root, and respect for antiquity influences all men”—and indeed some medical men ridiculed the idea of grounding scientific work on observation, which, given that the real world was rife with errors and exceptions, seemed patently foolish. Others stayed committed to the notion of two types of blood and thus of the value of bleeding a patient. Phlebotomy (bloodletting) was one of the roots of Galenist healing, and doctors and patients alike clung to it. It was tied both to the theory of humors and to the belief that purging the system was a key to healing, whether it was of the contents of the stomach, the bowels, or a portion of “impure” blood. Observation, however, showed that rather than restoring health, bleeding weakened a patient. To advocates of the new medical philosophy, bloodletting was symbolic of all that was wrong with the old ways—thus the reaction of Descartes, on his deathbed, to the suggestion of it.

Steadily, Harvey's system gained ground in the 1630s; people began to see it as the basis for a whole new approach to medicine, and exploring the recesses of the human body became a fad and an industry and a fascination matching the exploration of the heavens. In Holland, Reinier de Graaf delved into the mystery of birth: he applied his dissecting blade to pregnant rabbits and charted the route the fertilized ovum followed to the uterus. The Dane Nicolaus Steno, working in the hospital of the grand duke of Tuscany, took a step toward demystifying human emotion by laying bare the tear ducts and examining how they functioned. Medical professors created “domestic amphitheaters” in their homes to accommodate the rush of students signing up to observe dissections of human cadavers and vivisections of animals.

In Amsterdam, the physician Nicolaes Tulp gave public anatomy demonstrations, using the corpses of executed criminals. Far from being branded as an atheist, he was immortalized in a painting by Rembrandt in which, using forceps, he pulls aloft a muscle of the left arm of a cadaver. What's more, according to A. C. Masquelet, an orthopedic surgeon who has made a study of the painting, Tulp is holding his own left hand in such a way as to indicate how this particular arm muscle—the flexor digitorum superficialis—controls movement of the hand: the lesson isn't just on the fact of muscles but on the cause-and-effect relationships between parts of the body. The observers in the painting—neatly bearded men with white lace collars—lean in to watch, fascinated by the demonstration.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
signals one of those telltale shifts in what is deemed socially acceptable—like women wearing pants or the end of segregation in the American South—which to some spell the downfall of civilization while others view the change as an expression of a new era with a new idea of progress. The recesses of the human body, long kept determinedly shrouded in respectful mystery, had become spectacle.

B
UT FOR ALL THE
interest generated by the great scientific explorers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—Galileo, Bacon, Harvey, Kepler, Brahe, and others—their work was fragmented, so that the immediate effect of the endless experimenting, dissecting, peering, and analyzing was more confusion than clarity. Their results didn't fit within the framework of knowledge that had existed for four hundred years. It wasn't possible to use the ancient writers to explain them, and in fact the results threatened to undermine the pillars that had held up the edifice of meaning. It's difficult for us to appreciate what this meant at the time, largely because, as a direct consequence of these men's work, we live in a world with more than one meaning system. Of course, there are fundamentalisms now, too, but even fundamentalists today live with an awareness of relativism. They know there are other systems of belief, even if they are sure those are wrong. In the seventeenth century the challenge to what had been thought an absolute system of values and truths was so sharp and so disorienting that people of all walks of life, from popes to commoners with enough education to read pamphlets decrying the confusion, considered the situation a crisis. And no crisis is deeper than a crisis of belief.

Then, in 1637, a book appeared on the streets of Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, and London. On its title page was an engraved image of a bearded man, dressed in tunic and tights, digging in a garden—the seeker after philosophical truth in the guise of a humble laborer?—above which appeared the full title, written not in Latin but in French so that, its author asserted, it could be read by laypersons (French laypersons, anyway), including, somewhat scandalously, women:

Which is to say:
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Plus the Dioptric, Meteors, and Geometry, Which Are Essays in This Method.

The title page also listed the place of publication, the Dutch city of Leiden, and the name of the publisher, Jan Maire, who was at the time unknown but who would become famous because of this one volume. It was printed in an edition of three thousand copies. It would become one of the most influential books of all time.

Conspicuously absent was the name of the writer, who had previously noted that he wished to stay “hidden behind the scene so as to listen to what was said.” But the authorship of the
Discourse on the Method,
or
Discourse on Method
as it became known, was identified almost at once.

While he was still at school, Descartes had taken the increasingly apparent faultiness of the foundations for knowledge as a personal crisis. As he writes about it in the
Discourse,
this questioning of values comes off something like the sort of psychological or intellectual crisis that is common in people in their late teens and early twenties: “As soon as I had finished the course of studies which usually admits one to the ranks of the learned . . . I found myself saddled with so many doubts and errors that I seemed to have gained nothing in trying to educate myself unless it was to discover more and more fully how ignorant I was. . . . Nevertheless I had been in one of the most celebrated schools in all of Europe, where I thought there should be wise men if wise men existed anywhere on earth.” He cast about for moorings. He wasn't going to be duped by “the promises of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician.” Regarding the sciences as understood in the Aristotelian system, he judged that “nothing solid could have been built on so insecure a foundation.”

Then, like many a college graduate since, he determined to leave books behind and explore the world: “I resolved to seek no other knowledge than that which I might find within myself, or perhaps in the great book of nature.” He traveled—for nine years. “I did nothing but roam from one place to another, desirous of being a spectator rather than an actor in the plays exhibited on the theatre of the world.” Europe then being caught up in the massive tangle of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years War (they ran concurrently), the natural thing for a young man was to learn about the wider world via warfare. He spent time serving in two armies, that of Maurice of Nassau, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, then that of Maximilian I, elector of Bavaria. He managed to avoid actual combat, however, and instead assisted with solving military engineering problems.

According to Cartesian legend, while he was garrisoned in the Dutch city of Breda he was attracted, one autumn day, by a mathematical puzzle posted on a public notice board. (In an era before newspapers, with their games and diversions, such puzzles were commonly posted in public places.) It was in Dutch, so he asked the young man next to him if he could translate. A fast friendship formed. It happened that Isaac Beeckman had also been distraught over the shaky state of the foundations of the intellectual world in which they had grown up. Both, it seems, had hit on the same new strategy for obtaining genuine knowledge of the natural world: by applying mathematics to physics. The friendship became a kind of competition in which, as Descartes continued to travel with the army, they sent each other problems and investigations, and their correspondence built to a fever of helter-skelter discovery across a dizzying range of topics: music theory, the acceleration of falling bodies, the pressure that fluid exerts on its container, geometry. At the start Beeckman, who was seven years older, was in the role of teacher, but Descartes quickly shot past him, outlining in one letter his discovery of analytic geometry—the use of algebra to analyze geometrical shapes and problems, which in turn would become the basis for calculus—and crowing that once he had worked out the details “there will remain almost nothing else to discover in Geometry. The task is infinite and could not be accomplished by one person. It is as incredible as it is ambitious. But I have seen a certain light in the dark chaos of this science.” Modesty was not a condition from which Descartes suffered.

Shortly after, while stationed in Germany, his head teeming with ideas and his whole being straining to comprehend their totality, he spent a November night in a “stove”—a tiny room intensely heated by a ceramic furnace—and had a series of three momentous, hallucinogenic dreams. On waking, he felt that the dreams constituted a kind of vision: they were the distillation of all the lines of thinking he had been pursuing. The vision was of the natural world as a single system, with mathematics as its key. Pursuing this vision—a new way of seeing the universe and man's relation to it—would be his life's work. Descartes' night of heated dreams has gone down in anecdotal history as one of the fulcrums on which the Western world has turned.