Physicians’ Loci communes. Forms and Functions of Medical Commonplacing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

Commonplacing was one of the most widely practiced types of paper technology in the early modern period. Yet its place and function in medicine remain largely unexplored. Based on about two dozen manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which physicians used commonplacing to record excerpts from their reading as well as personal observations and ideas, this paper offers a first survey of the roles, forms and epistemic effects of medical commonplacing in the early modern period. Three principal types of commonplacing are identified, namely the systematic, the alphabetical and the sequential. The advantages and disadvantages of each type with regard to economy of space and time, flexibility, and order are pointed out. Among the potential epistemic effects of collecting and ordering information under “heads” are, in particular, a heightened awareness of contradictions between authors or observations on a specific topic, an appreciation for snippets of information as fact-like elements of knowledge inviting rearrangement, and a certain shift towards the notion of diseases as distinct entities endowed with specific, empirically observable properties.