{"title":"Contagious Vibrations: Sympathetic Resonance as a Model for Disease Transmission in the Writings of Ficino, Fracastoro, and Cardano.","authors":"Remi Chiu","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae023","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Contagious diseases were among the most vexing problems in ancient theories of health, which could not easily account for how a corruption of one person's humors could cause a similar corruption in another's. One useful explanatory concept for Renaissance doctors tackling this theoretical gap was the phenomenon of resonance or \"sympathetic vibration\" - where one stationary string begins to vibrate spontaneously when a similarly tuned string is plucked nearby - as both resonance and contagion involved some mysterious, insensible action at a distance between an agent and a patient. Tracing the writings of Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Fracastoro, and Girolamo Cardano, this essay explores the relationships between the writers' accounts of sympathetic vibrations and their contagion theories. It argues that different conceptions of the acoustic phenomenon - either as a manifestation of a Neo-Platonic World-Soul that underpinned the universe or else as a physical effect - revealed the writers' cosmological views that, in turn, informed their accounts of the human body and disease.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrae023","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"HEALTH CARE SCIENCES & SERVICES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Contagious diseases were among the most vexing problems in ancient theories of health, which could not easily account for how a corruption of one person's humors could cause a similar corruption in another's. One useful explanatory concept for Renaissance doctors tackling this theoretical gap was the phenomenon of resonance or "sympathetic vibration" - where one stationary string begins to vibrate spontaneously when a similarly tuned string is plucked nearby - as both resonance and contagion involved some mysterious, insensible action at a distance between an agent and a patient. Tracing the writings of Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Fracastoro, and Girolamo Cardano, this essay explores the relationships between the writers' accounts of sympathetic vibrations and their contagion theories. It argues that different conceptions of the acoustic phenomenon - either as a manifestation of a Neo-Platonic World-Soul that underpinned the universe or else as a physical effect - revealed the writers' cosmological views that, in turn, informed their accounts of the human body and disease.
期刊介绍：
Started in 1946, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences is internationally recognized as one of the top publications in its field. The journal''s coverage is broad, publishing the latest original research on the written beginnings of medicine in all its aspects. When possible and appropriate, it focuses on what practitioners of the healing arts did or taught, and how their peers, as well as patients, received and interpreted their efforts.
Subscribers include clinicians and hospital libraries, as well as academic and public historians.
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