Abstract

Francis Glisson was an anatomist and philosopher who held major positions in the academic and scientific life of seventeenth-century England . He was one of the leading lights of the post-Harveian physiology and wrote important works on the anatomy of the liver and the abdominal organs . He also published a metaphysical treatise on the notion of living matter, De Natura Substantiae Energetica . Despite his importance in seventeenth-century intellectual history, there is still no monograph on this author and, above all, no study that links his medical ideas to the underlying philosophical assumptions. The aim of this dissertation is to give a detailed portrait of Glisson as a physician, anatomist, and philosopher. ;This dissertation is a preliminary study that works towards a full recovery of the metaphysical context of Francis Glisson's medicine and philosophy. By metaphysical context, I mean the cluster of speculative themes that originates from a work in its vital symbiosis with a world that it endeavors to make meaningful and understandable. In Glisson's case, the metaphysical context of his work is represented by a set of ideas that we can call hylozoism , that is, a rigorous doctrine of living matter. Metaphysics and science are inextricably intertwined in Glisson's work and it would be impossible to understand the one without the other. Although I decided to focus on the metaphysical context of Glisson's work, I am perfectly aware that his work is embedded in the institutional, linguistic, rhetorical, social, religious, and political world of the seventeenth century. The above-mentioned dimensions are not denied or neglected: simply, the privileged point of observation will be the metaphysical perspective. Behind this decision, there is also a contingent reason. Because we do not possess many documents about Glisson's private, social, and political persona, we are left with the task of recreating in a plausible manner the outward world from the inward world of his work and ideas, taking ideas as living accretions of the human world, and not as crystalline and super-temporal patterns of thought