Fiber, Medicine, and Culture in the British Enlightenment

Hisao Ishizuka

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137580924
• eBook ISBN:
  9781349932689
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a full account of the concept of fiber and fiber theory in eighteenth-century British medicine. It explores the pivotal role fiber played as a defining, underlying concept in anatomy, physiology, pathology, therapeutics, psychology, and the life sciences. With the gradual demise of ancient humoralism, the solid fibers appeared on the medical scene both as the basic building unit of the body and as a dynamic agent of life. As such, fiber stands at the heart of eighteenth-century medicine, both iatromechanism and iatro-vitalism. Touching on the cultural aspects of fiber, the Baroque, and the culture of sensibility, this book also challenges the widely held assumption that the eighteenth century was the age of the nerve and instead offers an alternative model of fiber.

Part I
Prelude to the Fiber Body in the Latter Half of the Seventeenth Century, c.1650–1700

© The Author(s) 2016

Hisao IshizukaFiber, Medicine, and Culture in the British Enlightenment10.1057/978-1-349-93268-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Visualizing the Fiber-Woven Body: Emergence of the Fiber Body

Hisao Ishizuka¹

(1)

Senshu University Japan, Kawasaki shi, Tama-Ku, Japan

End Abstract

This chapter deals with the emergence of fiber theory in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Although medical writers did not fully establish fiber theory until the early eighteenth century, anatomists, physiologists, natural philosophers, and microscopists of the late seventeenth century made significant contributions to the formation of fiber theory and the idea of the fiber body. Nehemiah Grew (1641–1721), a plant anatomist, made one such crucial contribution to the emergence of the idea of the fiber body by most explicitly articulating the two constituent features of fiber theory: the idea of the fiber as the minimum constituent of the body and the idea that the whole body is variously interwoven of nothing but these fibers.

Focusing on Grew’s anatomical works, this chapter illuminates the significance of the new understanding of the body as fiber-woven textiles fully visualized in his plant anatomy. Grew combined fragmented ideas from anatomists and microscopists who studied the organs of the body into a coherent whole. By visualizing the complete fibrosity of the body and by exploiting the metaphor of textiles in describing the hidden fabric of body’s interiority, Grew paved the way for the emergence of fiber theory and the fiber body, to which most anatomists and physiologists of the Enlightenment subscribed. This chapter also attempts to show that Grew’s image of the fiber body as something that is interwoven and interconnected by and through fibers provided an antidote to the weakening of the societal bonds of late seventeenth-century England.

In the following section, I shall first treat the rise of the notion of fiber as the basic building unit of the body, touching on the microscopic observation of the micro-structure of the various materials that have a crucial impact on the view of the body as wholly composed of vessels; then I elucidate on the discovery of “texture,” exploring the new perception of the body as woven textiles, which culminates in Grew’s vision of plant anatomy, the theme of the second section. The final section addresses the socio-cultural background from which fiber theory emerged.

1 Prelude to the Fiber-Woven Body

1.1 From Minima to Fiber

What is the minimum building unit of the body? What uniform element composes this visible, tangible world of matter and especially this living body? Although the modern concept of tissue appeared with Bichat in the early years of the nineteenth century, a similar concept was already present in the minds of the ancient philosophers, from Empedocles to Aristotle. ¹ Aristotle’s conception of the “similar parts” and the “dissimilar parts” is perhaps most closely related to the modern idea of tissue ² ; according to Aristotle, the similar parts are the parts that may be divided several times while still retaining the same nature, while the dissimilar parts are composed of various similar parts. This division of the body was favored by anatomists and survived well into the seventeenth century. ³ The traditional anatomists did not seem to hold a strong motive that made them explain the composition of the body starting with the minimum unit of the body.

There was another Aristotelian doctrine both important and useful for understanding the basic constituent of the body—minima naturalia, the smallest particles fixed by nature. ⁴ In Aristotle’s account, the minima was inseparable from the theory of substantial form. It was supposed to be the temporary state of matter, the vehicle of “form”; once mixed, they lost their separate entities and merged into a homogeneous compound. ⁵ Thus, Aristotle’s minima differed from the concept of atomic particles of Democritus, which held them to be indivisible, unchangeable, indestructible entities endowed with tangible qualities, thus serving as the ultimate building block of all matter. ⁶ And yet, the concept of minima naturalia underwent a significant change in the hands of subsequent medieval commentators on Aristotle’s texts, who conflated minima particles with the particles of the flesh described by Aristotle in the biological context. Accordingly, the minima came to signify the smallest biological structural unit. ⁷ Furthermore, during the Middle Ages, the minima began to acquire a more direct physical meaning. While still distinguishable from atomistic particles, minima were thought to be closer to them; Julius Scaliger (1484–1558), for example, thought of minima as the first building blocks of a whole. ⁸

When the corpuscularian philosophy gained momentum in the seventeenth century, the scholastic minima naturalia was increasingly replaced by, or conflated with, the minima of atomistic particles endowed with three-dimensional physical qualities. The seventeenth-century revival of atomism, however, safely purged it of any atheistic implications associated with the system of Democritus. ⁹ As Boyle pronounced, minima naturalia “must have [their] determinate bigness or size, and [their] own shape.” ¹⁰ For corpuscularian and mechanical philosophers, the shape of the atom or particle is often crucial in explaining the sensible qualities, as fire atoms produce the sensation of heat through their pointedness. ¹¹ It is no wonder, then, that corpuscularian philosophers had great expectations of the newly introduced instrument, the microscope; with its help, they hoped to discern the particular sizes and shapes of the minute particles, so far only hypothetical entities. Their expectation was not realized, but the application of the microscope to the living body led some anatomists to search for a still smaller unit of the body, which was equivalent to the physicist’s atom, and to recast the scholastic minima (already conflated with the biological unit) into the constituent uniform unit of the living body. The hypothetical entities designating minima, such as Leeuwenhoek’s globule, Malpighi’s gland, and Grew’s fiber, all emerged in this context. ¹²

In a rather short span of time toward the end of the seventeenth century, however, the fiber rather than the other two candidates gained its place as the possible theoretical limit of the living body. One reason involves accepting that the figure of the fiber rather than that of the atom is apt for the minima of the body. The anatomists observed through the microscope the living body’s new micro-worlds as something resembling fibers and depicted these strange landscapes employing the fiber trope, as I shall show in this chapter. For instance, the texture of the skin, examined under the microscope by Hooke, appeared to consist of “a great many small filaments, which are implicated, or intangled one within another, almost no otherwise then the hairs in a lock of Wool…; but the filaments are here and there twisted…or interwoven, and here and there they join and unite with one another, so as indeed the whole skin seems to be but one piece.” ¹³ Even Leeuwenhoek, who had initially thought the globule to be the fundamental unit of the matter, was overwhelmed by evidence of an abundance of longitudinal rather than spherical elements; the worlds made up by the fiber, the filament, the thread, and the pipe eclipsed those made up of the globule: “those Membranes [of the carneous fibers of muscles] are made up of so many filaments or threds…. Observing these Membranes more narrowly, I saw, that they do wholly and only consist of small threds running through one another; of which some, to my eye, appear’d to be 10, 20, and sometime 50 times thinner than a hair.” ¹⁴ Persuaded by these observations, Leeuwenhoek finally dropped his own theory of globules in 1682, though he first doubted it as early as 1677. ¹⁵ Having found that the globules composing the muscular strings were not globules but “Rimples,” Leeuwenhoek imagined that there must be still smaller elements which could be further resolved into much smaller units:

If every Muscle be composed of so many thousands of Muscular chords, each inclosed with its particular membrane, and every Muscular chor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Prelude to the Fiber Body in the Latter Half of the Seventeenth Century, c.1650–1700
• 2. The Fiber Body in Eighteenth-Century Medicine
• 3. Fiber and Culture
• Backmatter