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Ian Maclean. Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine. Ideas in Context, no. 62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvi + 407 pp. $70.00 (0-521-80648-8).
Over the past twenty years, the study of medicine in the Renaissance has moved substantially away from a history of great discoveries or of confrontations between obstinate bigots, eyes firmly focused on the pages of their books, and iconoclastic experimenters. Very few of the familiar figures of the Renaissance fit these stereotypes; even Vesalius edited Galen, and Paracelsianism owed much to ideas from the Hippocratic Corpus. The more that is known about medical writing, or about medical and surgical teaching, the more Renaissance medicine is seen as a reengagement with challenging texts from the past as part of an ongoing concern with the diseases and ailments of the present.
Ian Maclean's substantial and frequently innovative study is concerned with medical thinking: the logic and interpretive methods used by learned physicians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries...