SERVICIO DE TELEFONÍA MÓVIL CELULAR VS SERVICIO MÓVIL

Both H art and Cotta vacillated between attacking the com m on people for their credulity and attacking those w ho deceived them. As David Harley has suggested, both authors directed the mainstay o f their invective against parsons and vicars who practised medicine and in particular those w ho engaged with what they regarded as illicit remedies and techniques such as judicial astrology. Hart criticised priest physicians in his two published works and in a manuscript which he himself suppressed. While the former complained in general terms about ministers and clergymen who practised medicine the latter was far m ore aggressive.^®^ He framed his argument in terms o f lawfulness, citing

Hart, The Arraignment of Urines^ (1623), p.47; Horace, Epistles^ I, vii, 24. Horace had in fact said that it was the wise, and not the vulgar, who knew the difference between coins and counters. John Palsgrave’s Lssclarissement de la Eangue Francqyse (1530) gave There is difference by-twene chalke and chese: II ya a dire entre craye et frommaige’ under its heading for ‘chalke’.

Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime^ p.59

Hart, KAINIKH^ pp.12-14; James Hart, ‘A DISCOURSE of the Lawlesse Intrusion of PARSONS & VICARS upon the Profession of Physicke with the Absurditie of the Same &c.’, reproduced in David Harley, ^ames Hart of Northampton and the Calvinist Critique of Priest- Physicians: An Unpublished Polemic of the Early 1620s’, Medical History Vol.42, (1998), pp.371-386.

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scripture, canon law, and the writings o f William Perkins in defence o f his claim that a man could no t be both an evangelist and a physician.’®"^ Parsons and vicars were intruders into the ‘profession’ o f physic, by which he m eant those w ho openly declared or ‘professed’ themselves to be physicians. As Harley notes. Hart, like Cotta before him, was appealing to growing concerns, among both N ortham ptonshire Calvinists and Jacobean Calvinists in general, over the abandonm ent, by a section o f the learned clergy, o f preaching and counselling in favour o f good works, a category which included medicine^°5. Provided the laity did not attem pt to practise medicine themselves H art was willing to place the weight o f blame on clergymen as ‘ringleaders and cheife maintainers o f such disorder’.^®^

As in other aspects o f early m odern social discourse, clergymen were expected to set an example for their congregations. Their role was both to scold and to guide. As Eam on Duffy has remarked, it is the tendency o f some historians to focus on the first o f these tasks that has led to a ‘two culture polarity’ which ignores the direction o f godly invective. Sermons on the “incorrigible profanity o f the multitude” were, more often than not, addressed to those who already regarded themselves as godly in order to fortify them in their evangelical role. They were part o f w hat Duffy terms the ‘perennial rhetoric o f reform ’ in which the emphasis was as much on the reformer as his congregation.

Just as clergymen had a duty to care for their congregations, so, too, physicians (by their own accounts) had an obligation to provide accurate medical advice; and physicians, like clergymen, subscribed to a paternalistic, ‘top-dow n’ view o f knowledge in which errors are the product o f proud learned men. While this view can be found among Calvinist writers such as Primrose who noted that ‘there are very few Errours

Harley, ‘James Hart’, p.372, fn. 43. Hart cited William Perkin’s ‘A Treatise of the Vocations’, in Works^ (Cambridge, 1603), p.919

*•^5 Harley, ‘James Hart’, p.364. As Harley notes the division between Calvinists and ‘anti- Calvinists’ was not clear-cut. Many godly Protestants advocated the practice of medicine by clergymen.

Harley, ‘James Hart’, p.371

Eamon Duffy, ‘The Godly and the Multitude in Stuart England’, The Seventeenth Century^

Vol.1, N o.l, (1986), p.40.

•‘^’8 Eamon Duffy, ‘The Long Reformation: Catholicism, Protestantism and the Multitude’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England'sLongRefomation 1500-1800^ (London: UCLPress, 1998), p.37. Not surprisingly, given his emphasis on continuities between late medieval Catholicism and

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abroad am ong the people, to which heretofore some Physitian or other hath not given a being, by reason o f some Theoremes and rules o f Physick, by them dl understood’, it is far stronger in the works o f Joubert (who along with those o f the Italian physician Scipio Mercurio, formed a model for Primrose); and it is a key feature o f the writings o f Browne.

While Joubert in his Barreurs Populaires (1570) was keen to remove proverbial errors from medicine, he was also able to see how these errors had come about through misinterpretations or vulgarisations o f classical texts. For example, in his commentary on the popular custom o f giving sausages made from hare’s blood as a sign o f affection (a custom he condem ned on account o f the tendency o f blood to putrefy), he noted the custom may be attributed to Plato’s placement o f the seat o f love and the production o f blood in the same organ, the l i v e r . T h o u g h he resented ignorant midwives, Joubert dealt with theic errors with hum our that was commensurate with a man who, at Montpellier and in his Traité du Ris (1579), extolled the therapeutic power o f laughter. As Mikhail Bahktin pointed out, Joubert, like his contemporary François Rabelais, was able to harness grotesque and sexually explicit language for didactic p u r p o s e s . ^ I n answer to the question ‘W hether it is true that an old man cannot beget sons’ he expostulated.

Stop to think! Does n ot one see old men who are quiet fiery and rigid, with litde or no catarrh or phlegm, handsome and with good colour? Why should it be that they n o t have a shot o f hot and dry sperm to beget a son? Add to this, if you will (as I said o f women) that he uses warming remedies com mon to old men: spices, un-watered wine, and so on. I think it could happen on occasion that, with his wife well disposed for it, he will have the sperm needed for a male.

Reformation Christianity, Duffy sees the writings of early Catholic reformers as forerunners to this rhetoric.

Primrose, Popular Errours^ p. 186; ibid, p.397. Primrose noted th a t‘not only the common people, but also very many Physicians’ recommended applying whelps and pigeons to the soles of the feet as a therapy for colds.

Laurent Joubert, The Second Part of the Popular Errors, trans. Gregory David de Rocher, (University of Alabama Press: Tuscaloosa and London, 1995), p.74, fn. 3. Joubert is referring to Plato’s Timaeus (69c-71a). Plato located the source of all the emotions except love in the liver.

Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p.68

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Elsewhere, Joubert had Democritus laughing over hum an folly and stupidity in much the same way as Burton would fifty years later in his The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).^^^ While there was ‘nothing m ore foul and unjust than an ignorant and untrained man’, error also lay in human pride and overconfidence which he regarded as the common downfall o f both physicians and e m p i r i c s . ^ F o r Joubert, as for Galen, medicine was an art based on conjecture. It lay at the midpoint between total ignorance and total knowledge — the former, in every likelihood, the result o f a search for the latter^ Joubert’s work was something o f a paradox, akin to the learned scepticism and ‘learned-

ignorance’ in Rabelais, Montaigne, and Burton.

Similar patterns are visible in Browne’s writings. Both his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) and his earlier P^ligio Medici (a work which, contrary to Buckle’s assertion, is inseparable from the Pseudodoxia), are centred around the Fall o f Man. An illustration o f the Fall is on the frontispiece o f Keligio Medici and it is the topic o f the first chapter o f Pseudodoxia

Epidemica^'^^. Though man was tem pted and deceived by Satan, it was hum an curiousity

and, above all, free will that brought about the FaU.^^^ The Fall, and the infinite gap that lies between m an’s worthiness and the glory o f G od, taints any further search for knowledge. As Browne notes, ‘We do but learn today what our better advanced judgements will unteach to m orow.’^^® This said, man, whose greatest sin was pride, should pursue knowledge not for himself, bu t to the glory o f G od, for ‘wisdom is His m ost beauteous Attribute; no man can attain unto it, yet, Solomon pleased G O D when he desired it.’^^^ True knowledge o f G od, like that o f the human soul, would always be denied to man; instead, its mystery formed the basis for faith. Browne recognised the limits that the Fall had placed on m an’s reason but, in com m on with Boyle a generation

"^Joubert, Popular Errors, p.52

’’•♦Joubert, Popular Errors, p.56. The quotation was from Terence’s Adelphoe, 1.98: “homine imperito numquam quicquam iniustiust”; ibid, p.87

’’^Joubert, Popular Errors, p.46; Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modem France,

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p.224. Davis points to the paradox inherent in Joubert’s work. On one hand it was intended to demystify medicine, on the other it was designed to keep medicine firmly within the hands of the university trained physician.

Cunningham, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and his Keligio Medid, pp.21-22

Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, p.7, ‘to speak strictly, the sin of the fruit was not the first offence, the first transgressed the rule of their own reason, and after the commandment of God.’

” 8 Browne, Keligio Medici, p.78 ’ ’ Browne, Keligio Medici, p. 14

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later, he saw this as the starting point, and not the terminus o f an examination o f the ‘art o f G o d ’.^^o ^ h is was Browne’s Christian fideism.

Browne’s beliefs can be interpreted within a philosophical framework provided by Christian Platonism and the theology o f Richard H o o k e r . W h i l e the former emphasised how forms (and in sixteenth and seventeenth century readings, it was the soul that gave m an his form) could n ot be realised; the latter focused on the damage that had been done to m an’s natural reason at the Fall, all the time seeking com fort in the special assistance that was available through God. Ideas such as these, along with a revival in the Stoicism, provided a cultural backdrop for a wide range o f writers and poets. Browne’s w ork also echoes that o f John Davies, Richard Greville, and John D onne, all o f whom , as learned men, confessed their own ignorance — a paradox in an age where, as Rosalie Colie suggested, learning rested on paradoxes.

In Pseudodoxia Epidemica Browne set out to examine the process by which knowledge was

\mlgarised and then to attem pt to correct these vulgarisations with w hat he called ‘three determinators o f truth. Authority, Sense, and Reason’ — categories which were taken from Francis Bacon’s posthumously published Sjlva Sylvamm (1627).^^^ Errors stemmed from learned authors and were disseminated by those who, in their veneration for ‘Authoriy’ and ‘times past’, treated their sources as infallible, pluming ‘themselves with others Feathers’ and turning things ‘knowne and vulgar’ into ‘reputed elegancies’. Though Galen and Hippocrates were in the main venerated (as was to be expected from a learned physician) because they had ‘conceived it no injustice, either to examine or refute the doctrines o f his predecessors’ others were judged m ore h a r s h l y ^ ^ 4 . Thucydides

was attacked for sprinkling his work with ‘fabulosities’, and Kiranides was criticised for popularising the ‘Naturall and Magicall properties o f things’ found in ‘Sundry Arabick

Browne, Religio Medici, p.l8; Michael Hunter, ‘How Boyle Became a Scientist’, Histoy of

Science, xxxiii, (1995), p.84, notes similarities between Boyle’s early manuscript work “O f the

study of the Booke of Nature” and Religio Media; cf. Jan Wojcik, Robert Boyle and the Limits of

Reason, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

121 Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), pp.37- 39; Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p.363

1—John Davies, Nosce Teipsum, (1599); Richard Greville, Treatise of Humane Learning, (1633); John Donne, ‘Anniversaries’. Cited in Colie, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, pp. 406-16

123 Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Vol.1, p.l76; Post, Thomas Browne, p.33. The structure of

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writers’ w ithout understanding their ‘beliefs’.^^^ O f all the ancient texts Pliny’s Natural

H isto^ was identified as the most prom inent source o f errors. As Browne remarked,

N ow w hat is very strange, there is scarce a popular errour passant in our dayes, which is no t either directly expressed, or diductively contained in this worke, which being in the hands o f m ost men, hath proved a powerfuU occasion o f

their propagation.^26

Pliny’s ‘curiositie’ was nothing com pared to the ‘credulity’ o f those who read and passed on his mistakes, and to this end Browne reserved the bulk o f his comments for authors o f books o f secrets such as Alessio o f Piedm ont and Giambattista deUa Porta (1535?- 1616), and encyclopaedists such as Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) and Conrad Gesner (1516-65), and their readers. Like Joubert, he dehvered his criticism with barely concealed laughter. *What foole’, he asked, ‘would beeleve, at least, what wise man would rely upon that Antidote delivered by Pierus in his Hieroglyphicks against the sting o f a Scorpion? that is to sit upon his Asse with ones face towards his taile; for so paine leaveth the man and passeth into the beast.’ Uncensored medical recipes were there to be ridiculed as were the ‘swarmes o f others ...men [have] dehvered in their writings, whose verities are onely supported by their Authorities: but being neither consonant unto reason, not correspondent unto e x p e r i m e n t . ’ ’ ^ ? Errors from printed books were

recycled over and over again as.

Authors presumably writing by com m on places where in for many years promiscuously amassing aU that makes for their subject, they break forth at last in trite and fruidesse Rhapsodies thereby doing not onely open injury unto learning, but committing a secret treachery upon truth. For their relations falling upon credulous Readers, they meet with prepared behefs, whose supinities had rather assent unto all, then adventure the triall o f any.’-®

Pseudodoxia Epidemica is a text loaded with paradoxes, anomahes, and contradictions,

some o f which are intentional, others less so. By the time Browne was writing, many o f his complaints were themselves, commonplace. Sixteenth-century physicians such Girolamo Mercuriale, a professor at the University o f Padua (where Browne has studied in the early 1630s) had, with few results, warned their students against the immoderate

Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica^ Vol.l, pp.32-38; ibid, p.46, ‘There is scarce any tradition or popular error but stands also delivered by some good Author.’; ibid., p.32

‘-5 Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Vol.l, p.52 Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Vol.1, p.49

*2? Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Vol.1, p.44; ibid p.679, G.P. Valeriano wrote Hiero^phica,

(1631)

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use o f compendia^ that is collections gleaned from other authors^^Q N either was the attack on Pliny new or particularly successful. It was just one aspect o f a somewhat chauvinist effort by humanist physicians such as Niccolo Leoniceno, to assert the superiority o f Greek medical texts over Roman ones in an attem pt to establish themselves as Galen’s true heirs. This was a process that had been taking place since the late fifteenth century. Browne’s attack over a century and a half later on the persistence o f Pliny’s errors is a fair guide to the failure o f Leoniceno’s invective. Vulgarisations o f Pliny’s Natural History both in the Latin and in the vernacular, were printed throughout the early m odern period and many more circulated as manuscripts.^^^

Also indicative o f the failure o f earlier attempts at reform were Browne’s criticisms o f those w ho relied too heavily on ‘Authority’ and commonplaces — criticisms that had been made by Bacon in The Advancement of Teaming (1605) forty years e a r l i e r .Pseudodoxia

Epidemica is a work o f synthesis that relies heavily on the use o f one authority to refute

another. For example, in his attempt to refute the error that elephants have no joints Browne presented a list o f offending ancient authors and encyclopaedists. Having begun his list with Aristode and complained that it is difficult o f conceive o f a creature without joints walking, Browne then returns to Aristode as a source o f authority on animal locomotion — ‘as Aristode teacheth’. In short, his account, like those o f his near contemporary Edward Topsell, rests heavily on examples taken from classical mythology and n o t from e x p e r i e n c e . A similar trend is clear in Browne’s discussion o f the medical qualities o f the unicorn’s horn and the bezoar stone^^'^, which as we have seen, were used as specifics. Browne was in no doubt about the existence o f both drugs and based his description o f them on the accounts given by Phny and Solinus. He believed bodi to have ‘Antidotall qualities’ against poisons but rejected the suggestion, made by ‘M odernes’, that they would protect people from poisons that worked by ‘corrosion o f

’29 Richard J. Darling, ‘Girolamo Mercuriale’s “De Modo Studendi” ’, edited by Michael McVaugh and Nancy Siraisi, OsiriSy Vol.6, (1990), p. 184, fn.9

On this point see Nutton, ‘Hellenism postponed’, pp. 169-70

Browne worked from the 1634 edition of Philemon Holland’s, Historié of the World. Commonly