, whose practice lacks method and judgment, and the "Rationalists," who wrongly despise experience, is not original. We can trace such an opposition back to
, nor speculative physicians, who, like the spider, "spin all [their] threads out of [their] own body without gathering materials from abroad," have the right attitude towards experience, which has to be collected with order and assimilated. 50 Baglivi refuses the opposition between reason and experience, since "reason" provides knowledge of future events from the knowledge of actual things -that is to say, reason constitutes the condition of the foresight on the basis of past events, which forms the essence of therapeutics
, This equivocity of the term "empirics" appears clearly in the mid-18 th century, in Diderot's Encyclopédie: since everybody agrees on the necessity of experience -and, more exactly, exinde praeceptis practicis deducendis requiritur; unde nil mirum si ex stupido, nebuloso, ac prorsus erroneo experiundi genere
, ? non ita si Empiricam [sectam] rationalem, sive Empiricam factam litteratam, methodo non casu inventam, ab intellectu faecundatam, & directam, & post diuturnam effectuum morborum explorationem ad veritatis culmen perductam; quam mehercule docti Viri semper laudarunt, & tanquam naturae consonam ad majora promoverunt), Opera omnia, p.167, 1704.
, And as for Bacon, see Novum organum, in The works of Francis Bacon, Facsimile-Neudruck der Ausgabe von Spedding, vol.95, p.201, 1963.
, Quomodo enim dici potest, omnes Rationi partes tribuendas esse ea in disciplina, quae, ut sapiens quisque fateri debet, longinqui temporis usu, ac periclitatione acquiritur? Aut respectum ad solam experientiam habendum esse, & nullo loco rationem esse numerandam ; modo Rarionis nomine, non illa vis animi intelligatur, quae obscura naturae investigans inventio, & excogitatio dicitur, & magis ad physicam pertinent : sed illa potius Domina omnium, & Regina Ratio, per quam consequentia videt Medicus, morborum principia, Opera omnia, vol.1704, pp.7-8
, Now the infancy of Physick, which owes its first nourishment to the history of diseases, cannot be confounded and tyed up to the rules of other sciences, vol.28
, , p.28
, , p.208
, Spicilegium anatomicum, p.2
, De recentiorum medicorum studio dissertatio, in Malpighi, Opera posthuma, p.258, 1698.
, Baglivi esteems first that the best principles in medicine are common to all sects, according to what Seneca recommends in morality 63 : Of the precepts for life and manners, those are the best which are publick and common, and universally acknowledg'd by all sectaries, whether Peripateticks, Academicks, Stoicks or Cynicks. The Physicians of this Age, ought to mind that saying of Seneca's concerning manners; for the precepts of practice that they give our now adays, are neither general nor common to each sect, namely, the Galenical, Chymical, Mechanical, etc. (as Hippocrates's Works are) but are chiefly confin, As for the theoretical basis of his De praxi medica
, 65 Such a consensual reference to Hippocratic therapeutics allowed Baglivi to introduce his own research on fibers and the recent mechanical discoveries of the Moderns, without appearing to be enlisted in the different modern "sects": In this our age [the methodick sect] begins to revive; for the coagulation and dissolution of the fluids, the tension and flaccidity of the solids, to which the moderns attribute the origine of all diseases, is exactly of a piece with the strictum and laxum of the methodicks; and the practice of the best physicians now in Italy is grounded on the hypothesis of structure and laxity mechanically explain'd; for the understanding of which you ought to read the writings of those learned physicians of Naples, apparently provided the best possible medical synthesis for Baglivi, given his theory of "laxum" and "strictum
, Baglivi's medicine is based on an eclecticism supposedly inspired by
, On the contrary, they are presented both as a modern adaptation of the Hippocratism required to found a therapeutics and as a rational exigency
, This, to avoid this reef also, I decided to press with all my might in physics for what Seneca often urges strongly regarding moral precepts; he states that the best moral precepts are those which are in common use, widely accepted, and which are jointly proclaimed by all from every school, Peripatetics, Academics, Stoics, and Cynics? Thus I do not determine whether particles of a natural substance can or cannot undergo change?, One could find the same kind of argument in Steno's geological treatise, p.145, 1968.
, , pp.31-32
, The Hague/Boston/London, Martinus Nijhoff, vol.66, pp.269-270
, De praxi medica, the distinction between acute and chronic diseases, or the distinction between several time-periods