Newly discovered handwritten notes show for the first time the Venetian physician Santorio Santorio (1561–1636), who invented the thermometer and helped lay the foundations for modern medical treatment, also played a key role in shaping our understanding of chemistry.
Portrait of Santorio Santorio by Giacomo Piccini.
Handwritten notes made by Santorio in a 1625 edition of his own book Commentaria in primam Fen primi libri Canonis Avicennae (A Commentary on the First Fen of the First Book of Avicenna’s Canon) show he realized matter was made from invisible ‘corpuscles.’
Although the Greek philosopher Democritus and others after him had already maintained the existence of such bodies, historians previously believed that nobody had come up with the proof for their existence before Galileo.
The book was found by Dr. Fabrizio Bigotti, a specialist in history and philosophy of science at the University of Exeter, UK.
The language used and handwriting style strongly suggest the notes were made by Santorio, according to Dr. Bigotti, who is the author of a paper published this week in the journal Ambix.
“The paper presents some of Santorio’s marginalia to his Commentaria in primam fen primi libri Canonis Avicennae (Venice, 1625), which I identified in the Sloane Collection of the British Library in 2016, as well as the evidence for their authorship,” Dr. Bigotti explained.
“The name of Santorio is linked with the introduction of quantification in medicine and with the invention of precision instruments that, displayed for the first time in this work, laid down the foundations for what we today understand as evidence-based medicine.”
“But Santorio’s monumentale opus also contains evidence of many quantified experiments and displays his ideas on mixtures, structure of matter and corpuscles, which are in many cases clarified and completed by the new marginalia.”
Santorio’s marginal note to col. 406C-D, in Santorio Santorio, Commentaria in Primam Fen Primi Libri Canonis Avicennae (Venice, 1625). Image credit: British Library.
“This discovery makes the case for a deeper study of early modern chemistry in the Medical School of Padua, where Santorio taught, and the work carried out there between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the 17th century,” he said.
“Santorio’s true contribution to chemistry has been forgotten but, I hope, this new discovery means that will no longer be the case.”
“The notes show he did not see the world not made up of four elemental qualities — hot, cold, dry and moist — as Aristotle had suggested,” Dr. Bigotti added.
“This helped to start the process of getting rid of the idea that magic and the occult could be found in nature.”
“It is truly remarkable that, beyond his undoubted merits in science and early modern technology, Santorio also held very innovative ideas on chemistry and was so fully committed to investigating the structure of matter,” he said.
Santorio had correctly identified the minimal structure of matter as a series of corpuscles as early as 1603, and proved his assumptions by means of a series of optical experiments on light, as well as distilling urine.
All these experiments were carried out with instruments Santorio made especially for his own research.
“It was already known that Santorio laid the foundations for what is understood today as evidence-based medicine and the study of metabolism,” Dr. Bigotti said.
“The new discovery shows he was he among the first scientists to suggest the body aims at preserving its own balance through discharge of invisible particles.”
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Fabrizio Bigotti et al. A Previously Unknown Path to Corpuscularism in the Seventeenth Century: Santorio’s Marginalia to the Commentaria in Primam Fen Primi Libri Canonis Avicennae (1625). Ambix, published online May 28, 2017; doi: 10.1080/00026980.2017.1287550
This article is based on text provided by the University of Exeter.
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