Mathematica Medica: Santorio Santorio and the Quest for Certainty in Medicine

Fabrizio Bigotti

doi:10.4172/2472-1654.100039

Abstract

Along with mechanics and astronomy, medicine played an important role at the beginning of the sixteenth century in the process that led to a new understanding of measurement and its importance for the progress of knowledge. A pivotal figure in this sense can be considered the Italian physician Santorio Santori (1561-1636) who, with his work Ars de statica medicina (Venice 1614), originated an entire path of experimental procedure across the Europe. Santorio was quite aware of the modern idea of experimentation as he experimented daily for over twenty five years. For the sake of scientific certainty, he felt also the need to devise and construct new instruments, such as the ‘weighing chair’ (statera medica), the hygrometer, the first graded thermometer, and the ‘pulsilogium’ (an early pulsimeter). Through these devices he managed to assess each of the many parameters involved in the complex calculation of the perspiratio insensibilis (insensible perspiration of the body). Relying on his quantitative experiences, Santorio envisaged the body as a clockwork, and explored its main functions by means of mathematical parameters (numero, pondere et mensura). As part of a major international project devoted to investigating the Emergence of Quantifying Procedures in Medicine at the End of the Renaissance, funded in 2015 by the Wellcome Trust and hosted by the Centre for Medical History (CHM) of the University of Exeter, this paper explores some aspects of the legacy of the Italian scientist.

Highlights

I send to His Lordship the two books on the Avicenna’s text and I pray His Lordship to read them carefully, because He will read new thoughts, yet based on the authorities of Hippocrates and Galen, as far as both practice and experience are concerned. [...] All the more, HL will see the advantage that is possible to glean from the use of the statics I invented and that, for sure, is possible to call ‘medical mathematics’ so much we gain in certainty regarding medical things[1]
With these very words, extracted from a letter addressed in the 27th of December 1625 to his friend Senatore Settala, the Italian
Capodistria was under the protection of the Serenissima Republic of Venice where Santorio went to study under the guidance of the Morosini family

Summary

Introduction

I send to His Lordship the two books on the Avicenna’s text and I pray His Lordship to read them carefully, because He will read new thoughts, yet based on the authorities of Hippocrates and Galen, as far as both practice and experience are concerned. [...] All the more, HL will see the advantage that is possible to glean from the use of the statics I invented and that, for sure, is possible to call ‘medical mathematics’ (mathematica medica) so much we gain in certainty regarding medical things[1]. Not infrequently Santorio compares the organism to the clock, in order to explain the manifestation of occult qualities from the prime matter[16], the generation of the vital spirits through the heart and brain – an example adopted without changes by Descartes in his Description du corps humain17- the mechanism of plague’s contagion[18] and, the body in its entirety[19] This concept shows another possible way to interpret Santorio’s idea of quantification, namely as a ‘mechanization of qualities’, to borrow a Dijksterhuis expression[20], an idea that later would represent a model developed by Descartes’ followers and adopted by the so-called iatromechanical school of physicians. It is not surprising that Jacopo Grandi, one of Santorio’s early biographers, in his speech on the anniversary of Santorio’s death (addressed to the Collegio dei medici fisici di Venezia in 1671) represented him as a new Heron of Alexandria, devoted to finding a way to make more understandable the principal functions of the human body by inventing precision devices and suggesting ways to quantify its dynamics

Some Conclusion

Short Bibliography