Giovanni Baptista Morgagni (1682–1771), Professor of Anatomy at Padua, produced the most important studies in the eighteenth century on the De Medicina of the Roman encyclopediast A. Cornelius Celsus.  Morgagni’s intensive reading of Celsus combined his own medical experience with philological emendation.  Morgagni contextualized Celsus’ text within a theoretical framework of an empirically ordered transhistorical investigation of the structure, function, and pathology of the human body.  Here ancient and modern disciplinary authorities engaged with the same evidence available to the senses.  Morgagni’s argument in part contrasted Celsus’ humoralist evidence that bladder stones originate in the substance of the urine with Friedrich Hoffmann’s (1660–1742) argument that bladder stones originate in the iatromechanist action of the kidneys.  Morgagni’s emendations continue to mark our own contemporary editions of Celsus’ Latin text.

This chapter outlines important theoretical and methodological facets of elite medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and traces some developments in each, highlighting their significance for the history and philosophy of the Scientific Revolution. The chapter looks first at “theoretical” questions (centered on medical physiologia), tracing interactions between various Galenic, chymical, and mechanical streams of thought. It then turns to “methodological” issues, examining changing understandings of and roles for observation, experience, and experiment, with some special attention on method in anatomy. Throughout the Scientific Revolution, these theoretical and methodological developments interacted in complex and productive ways. Indeed, it is perhaps best to see medical efforts to develop the science of the living body in this period as an exploration of the changing space of possibilities defined by varying theoretical commitments and a broadening commitment to, expectation of, and attention to discovery by experience and experiment.

This chapter argues for the centrality of the natural sciences in the Scottish Enlightenment. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the activities of mathematical practitioners such as George Sinclair and virtuosi such as Sir Robert Sibbald laid the institutional foundations for the cultivation of natural knowledge in the Enlightenment era and incorporated the sciences of nature into Scotland s emerging public sphere. The restructuring of the Scottish universities in the decades following the Glorious Revolution enhanced the facilities for teaching and research in the sciences and, in doing so, fostered the rise of Newtonianism in Scotland. Newton’s writings inspired innovative work by Colin Maclaurin and other Scottish Newtonians across the many branches of mathematics and natural philosophy and also shaped the methods employed in the nascent ‘science of man’. The compatibility of the Newtonian system with religious belief, in turn, served to solidify the place of natural knowledge in Enlightenment culture, as did the harnessing of such knowledge to economic improvement. Even though the debate over James Hutton s theory of the earth in the 1790s challenged the alliance between science and religion, the natural sciences had by then established themselves as integral and vital components of the Scottish Enlightenment.