Medical Approaches to the Mind in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Until the eighteenth century, the medical view of the mind remained inextricably intertwined with a genuinely Hippocratic notion of nature. Within this framework, “nature” was supposed to have faculties of its own (οἰκείαι δυνάμεις), which allowed every living being to grow in all directions and to be fashioned in every single part while processing flows of external and internal matter through elaborate sequences of assimilation and evacuation (I, xv, 60). In this sense, the basic stages of life were nutrition, growth and formation. Unsurprisingly, in De naturalibus facultatibus Galen had characterized nature as being “creative” (τεχνική) in every single particle of the body. Indeed, nature was the original artist, in that the way it built natural bodies was a paragon of efficiency and ingenuity, clumsily imitated by human beings every time they fashioned their artifacts working from the outside in. In a manner that could not be replicated by technology, nature shaped every single part of matter by following the opposite route, from the inside out (II, iii, 82).