| This project explores the intellectual, cultural, and practical interactions among chymistry, medicine, and atomism in the early-modern German university and laboratory by focusing on chymical medicine in the works and letters of the Wittenberg professor of medicine Daniel Sennert. Sennert was an early atomist who had a major influence on Robert Boyle, was among the first to offer university chymical pedagogy, and was one of the most widely read authors on medicine and natural philosophy in the early seventeenth century, but much of his chymico-medical oeuvre remains neglected.;Sennert envisioned a major reform of Galenist pathology and pharmacy founded upon experience, atomism, a redefinition of chymistry, and a new understanding of the material principles of nature. This reform was associated with a serious interest in chymical medicines, among which were nearly-universal noble metallic remedies as well as cathartic medicines thought to purge the body in multiple ways. That Sennert's reform of medicine was perceived as radical is apparent from the several controversies to which it led, including an extended dispute with Groningen professor Johann Freitag, in which Sennert was accused of blasphemy and heresy. Several of Sennert's chymical and chymico-medical experiments shed new light on this controversy and develop notions of experience and credulity in early-modern natural philosophy.;Sennert pursued chymical medicines and carried out numerous experimental trials both via a collaborative epistolary exchange with his brother-in-law, Michael Doring, and with students in his "chymical college." The conceptualization of these remedies within rational medicine was a major part of his effort to locate a via media between iconoclastic Paracelsian chymists and traditionalist Galenists and Aristotelians. Likewise, Sennert drew from Lutheranism and literary humanism to style himself an incredulous observer of nature, but also to develop a conception of the public good in opposition to secretive empirics and charlatans during the unrest of the Thirty Years' War. By historicizing the generation and transmission of chymico-medical knowledge and experience in the early Republic of Letters, this project suggests that Sennert was not simply a reformer who developed concepts integral to later chymistry, but anticipated important values and ideals of later scientific discourse. |
