MEDICINE AND SOCIETY IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: THEIR INFLUENCE ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF HERMAN BOERHAAVE, 1668-1738

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the dismemberment of the Aristotelian-Galenic tradition in science and medicine. Advances in astronomy, physics, anatomy, and chemical understanding gradually replaced the well-developed systems of medieval thought. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the mechanical philosophy achieved a new prominence which was to dominate European scientific thought for the next century. Its main tenets were to accept nothing as true unless it could be proven mathematically or experimentally, and that all physical events in the Universe are due to matter in motion and attraction. In medicine the greatest proponent of mechanical explanations for health and disease was Herman Boerhaave of Leyden, whose wide-ranging knowledge and great powers of industry made possible in all-encompassing system of physiology and therapy which was greatly influential in western European and American medical thought. The origins of Boerhaave's doctrines, not one of which was original, indicate that his teachings were widely accepted because they were already well-known to the general medical community, were based upon the best observational data then available, and eliminated the occult as a factor in the life processes. While Boerhaave looked backwards for the sources of his ideas, he recognized new theories and discussed them with his students, and in that way he stimulated later generations to study the questions raised by the seventeenth-century "New Science." In this sense, Boerhaave was the last of the medieval physicians and the first of the moderns. His legacy has influenced medical thought and teaching down to the present time.