Medicine and the Reformation

The historiography of science is now unthinkable without a keen awareness of the interactions between science and religion. Shelves of books and countless articles have been and continue to be written about the relationship between these two great pretenders to supreme knowledge. In general, earlier suggestions that science and religion were completely inimical to one another, irreconcilable rivals for cognitive authority, have given way to a near consensus (particularly with regard to the medieval and early modem period) that religion was a great motivator towards what we recognize as scientific study of the natural world. The best studies within this newer consensus show how religious beliefs could affect even the most technical details of scientific study. Religion in the historiography of medicine plays a much smaller role, but change is under way. This collection of essays is one of the best recent contributions to a gradually increasing area of concern for medical historians. The eight essays range widely, from Denmark to Venice and from Germany to Spain, from university anatomy to faith healing, from Lutherans to converted Jews and Moslems. Unlike some collections, however, a strong sense of thematic unity remains as the reader learns more and more of the fine detail of Reformation attitudes to the role of medicine. After a deft, scene-setting Introduction by the editors, there are two essays on different aspects of the medical education introduced by the reforms of Phillip Melanchthon. Vivian Nutton makes an elegant plea on behalf of anatomy teachers at Wittenberg, suggesting that, in their own terms, they were as successful as Paduan anatomists. The key to understanding why they have failed to make so great an impact on subsequent anatomical science lies in their religious concerns. Taking their lead from Melanchthon's conviction that the soul could not be understood properly without a knowledge of the body, Wittenberg anatomists developed an anatomy in the service of Lutheranism. Nutton's account is an excellent first step towards understanding medical attitudes to the body in Lutheran Germany but it leaves a number of questions for future research. Nutton suggests that Melanchthon "posited a strong interaction between body and soul" (p. 12), but Luther himself, as is well known, denied the immortality of the soul as a Greek corruption introduced into Christian thought by neo-Platonizing humanist Popes, and seems to have held a mortalist position. It might prove possible to re-state Nutton's thesis more forcefully and suggest that Wittenberg anatomy was intended to show that the soul was in fact inseparable from the body and that Luther's emphasis on the bodily resurrection, rather than a spiritual eternal life, was true doctrine. Sachiko Kusukawa follows with a study of the role of astrology in medical education at Wittenberg. Astrology was defended by Melanchthon as a "pointer to God" (p. 41), an undeniable indicator of the interconnectedness of all things, and therefore of the existence of divine Providence. Lutheran astrology, she concludes, like its anatomy, was intended to profess and promote the reformed faith. Charles Webster offers a first step towards a reassessment of Paracelsus. In a persuasive account Webster suggests that we must "recognize the unity of his vocation as apostle, prophet and healer" (p. 74), and begins to indicate how the obscurities of his medical writings may be dispelled by an understanding of the religious and political protest literature of the Reformation. The point being, to oversimplify, that Paracelsus's medical writings were simultaneously contributing to that protest literature. Ole Peter Grell shows the links between Caspar Bartholin's belief that the Lutheran reformation was incomplete and should be continued and his schemes for the radical reform of medicine. The revival of the concept