The Challenging Patient: Medicine in the Correspondence between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth
نویسندگان
چکیده
While the majority of Descartes’ medical writings detail the machinery and mechanics of the human body – its material parts, their organization, and their lawful operations – Descartes’ correspondence with Princess Elisabeth highlights what is ultimately at stake in his medicine, namely, the health of the human being. Medicine is a significant theme in their correspondence, and their discussions on the topic are distinctively prescriptive: Descartes in the role of doctor and Elisabeth as patient. Descartes is genuinely concerned with Elisabeth’s health, and when Elisabeth’s own health is compromised by sickness, Descartes responds with diagnoses and remedies that concern the body and the soul and the relationship between the two in cases of illness and health for a human being. As he develops the theoretical and practical considerations that go into his medical advice, Descartes fills the roles of doctor and philosopher, and what emerges from his letters is a model of medicine that complements as well as distinguishes itself from other models of prescriptive medicine that belong to Descartes’ medical philosophy. Meanwhile, for her part in the correspondence, Elisabeth takes the role of both patient and critic of Descartes’ medicine. In this paper, I examine the medical model that Descartes advances in his correspondence with Elisabeth, comparing and contrasting it to other prescriptive models found elsewhere in his writings, and I argue that Elisabeth raises philosophically significant and compelling problems with Descartes’ medical project when she questions the compatibility between, on the one hand, his medical goal and his recommended means to it and, on the other, some of his core metaphysical and epistemological commitments.
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