Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The present study is concerned with notions of the human body in sixteenth-century Portugal and the ways in which they are expressed. It focuses on scholarly medical texts but it also makes use of a limited range of literary and iconographic material. It addresses two related questions: first, the more general question of the links between representations of the human body and ideas and historical developments in their cultural setting; second, the more particular problem of the way these representations express modes of thought in medicine. It is considered here that an enquiry into verbal and visual devices used by thinkers illuminates the relationship of these thinkers with intellectual trends and ideas. Through the discussion of linguistic devices and visual images, this study attempts to offer a nuanced account of the intellectual and cultural influences which occurred in the Portuguese academic context of the sixteenth century, with particular emphasis on medicine. The analysis of representations of the body reveals a shaded spectrum of affiliations of Portuguese scholars to Renaissance humanism, Neoplatonism, Aristotelian scholasticism and, albeit not as frequently as other influences, the empirical trend which emerged in the early modern period. It shows that, although there can be no doubt that Galen was the most prominent influence among the thinkers studied, their relation to medical and philosophical systems is more complex than the characterization of these thinkers simply as "Galenists" might lead one to expect. It also shows that the notions of the human body investigated are rightly designated as "cultural", since they express intellectual attitudes, beliefs and imagery of their context, and their scope extends beyond the domain of medicine