フェルネル研究の基礎
Platform
for Fernel-Studies
ロンドン計画
ジャン・フェルネルの『隠れた事物の原因について』（パリ、1548）：
ルネサンス医学におけるガレノス主義、人文主義、新プラトン主義
One Page Outline Proposal
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Jean Fernel’s De abditis rerum causis (Paris,
1548): In the history of northern Renaissance
medicine, Jean Fernel (1497-1558) played a particularly important role
through his textbooks as well as his teaching and practice in the medical
faculty of Paris. His treatise entitled De abditis rerum causis (On
the Hidden Causes of Things) sets out the foundations of entire medical
philosophy. Through a dialogue between three scholars (Eudoxus the Galenist,
Brutus the Platonist and Philiatros the Christian layman), Fernel
endeavoured, in a very humanist way, to find the “Divine” in natural world,
and especially in medicine, by harmonising the different types of ancient
wisdom. By this quest, he believed he would find the theoretical base for
effective cures for the new diseases then attacking all Europe, such as Syphilis.
He tried to reconcile the medical humanists’new Galen with the Christian
faith and introduced the Christian Neoplatonism of Marsilio Ficino
(1433-1499) and Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486-1535) into university medical
teaching. His influence on later generation, including not only medics but
also natural philosophers, was enormous, as we can observe in the medical and
natural philosophical texts of the second half of the sixteenth century and
the first half of the seventeenth century (William Harvey, Jean Riolan the
elder, Daniel Sennert, Jacques Gohory, Petrus Severinus, Bernardino Telesio,
Francis Bacon and so on). His De abditis rerum causis also permitted
Renaissance “occult” oriented philosophers to combine academic Galenism with
Paracelsianism and other Neoplatonic trends. After
the ground-breaking work of C. Sherrington (1946), there are only two
substantial works on Fernel, both of which are unpublished doctoral
dissertations: that of L. A. Deer on Fernel’s embryological theory (1980) and
that of J. J. Bono on Fernel’s idea of medical spirits (1981). There is thus
no monograph on Fernel, especially on his central work on medical philosophy,
the De abditis rerum causis. I propose to analyse, at the first
stage, the contents and organisation of Fernel’s text in its Galenic,
humanistic and Neoplatonic aspects (briefly touched on in my doctoral
thesis), and then make a survey of its influence in later generations. This
would help me towards a critical edition of and commentary on De abditis
rerum causis. Essential
Bibliography --- Jean Fernel, De abditis rerum causis libri duo
ad Henricum II franciae regem christianissimum, Paris, 1548. |