“Ex ponderatione noveris”: stile e pensiero negli aforismi dell’Ars […] de statica Medicina (1614)

Abstract

Published in Venice in 1614, the Ars […] de Statica Medicina is the most significant work – both in terms of editions and translations – by the Istrian physician Santorio Santorio (1561–1636), who served for many years as Professor of Theoretical Medicine at Padua and is still remembered for his experiments devoted to quantifying perspiratio insensibilis as well as for elevating principles of measurement to the primary method for defining the patient’s state of health and disease. The 502 aphorisms that compose this treatise are examined here from a linguistic and rhetorical perspective, with the aim of investigating the formal recurrences that characterize the author’s mode of exposition, and explore the connection between writing style and experimental practice. Particular attention is devoted to the unfolding of syntactic structures and to the recurring and strongly marked figures of symmetry that distinguish them: the syntactic parallelism, and the syntactic correlation. Both phenomena, skillfully interwoven, shape aphorisms that, in their very articulation, lay bare the author’s modes of reasoning. In this way, the relationship emerges between the forms of linguistic argumentation and the interpretation of natural phenomena in mathematical terms: a conceptual framework that, on the threshold of the early modern period, came to be applied also in the medical domain, with Santorio standing as one of its foremost exponents. This study thus seeks to enrich –through the analysis of linguistic phenomena as bearers of historical and cultural meaning – our understanding of the profound evolutionary dynamics that shaped the history of ideas in the century of the Scientific Revolution.