The fluid mechanics of nutrition: Herman Boerhaave鈥檚 synthesis of seventeenth-century circulation physiology
- 作者：Barbara Orland barbara.orland@unibas.ch
- 关键词：Herman Boerhaave ; Circulation physiology ; Early modern metabolic accounts ; Blood ; milk and chyle ; The diseases of women&rsquo ; s milk
- 刊名：Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C ; Biological and Biomedical Sciences
- 出版年：2012
- 期刊代码：113_13698486
- 类别：soc
- 出版时间：June, 2012
- 卷：43
- 期：2
- 页码：357-369
- 文件大小：287 K
摘要
This paper investigates the theory of nutrition of Herman Boerhaave, the famous professor of medicine and chemistry at the university of Leyden. Boerhaave鈥檚 work, which systematized and synthesized the knowledge of the time, represents a shift from a humoral to a hydraulic model of the body in medicine and culture around 1700. This epistemological reconfiguration of early modern physiological thinking is exemplified with respect to the changing meanings of milk. While over centuries the analogy between blood and milk played an essential role in understanding the hidden workings of the nutritional faculties, following the discovery of the blood circulation the blood-milk analogy was transformed into a chyle-milk analogy. Yet Boerhaave鈥檚 interpretations show that the use of new knowledge tools did not simply displace the old ways of reasoning. Instead, analogies continued to serve as epistemic instruments. Old theories and new insights overlapped, and contemporary knowledge assimilated past ideas.