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Abstract

Jean Femel (ca. 1497-1558) wrote an important and comprehensive series of compendious medical textbooks, beginning with the Physiologia of 1542 and culminating with the Pathologia and Therapeutice of 1554, but it is generally acknowledged that his most important, and most original, work was the De abditis rerum causis. Reprinted numerous times from presses in France, Germany and the Netherlands over the following century, either singly or as part of the collection of his medical works, Unit'ersa meditina, it was widely read and highly influential. Femel's claims, both in natural philosophy and medicine, were frequently examined in university disputations, and even stimulated other writers to publish commentaries upon his work. The importance of the De abditis tausis is by no means confmed to the history of medicine. The first of its two books is concerned entirely with natural philosophy, and there is much here on the nature of generation and growth, the nature of life and the soul. Moreover, it is evident, from the title no less than the contents, that Femel was concerned not just with the occult diseases that form the main focus of the second book, but with occult causes in general. Indeed, it is the association of this work with the occult, and our modem ill-conceived notion of the meaning of the term "occult", which has resulted in the eclipse of Femel's great work. It is hoped that this new edition and translation will not only help us to recover the crucial significance of occult qualities in Renaissance natural philosophy and medicine, but