Treccani History of Science
The age of Enlightenment
G4 – Life sciences
Edited by François Duchesneau
The evolution of biomedical sciences in the eighteenth century
• 1. The planetary inventory of living forms
• 2. The analysis of vital organization
• 3. The profile of the experimental research
• 4. Medicine in transformation
• 5. The concept of vital organization: Blumenbach and Kant
The collection and the study of plants and animals
• 1. The diversity of collections
• 2. The order of cabinets and the order of Nature
• 3. Botanical gardens
The inventory of living form
• 1. The proper use of inventories
• 2. Linnaeus and his ‘apostles’
• 3. Individual adventures and collective enterprises
• 4. Scientific motivations and political interests
• 5. An intellectual assessment of naturalistic inventories
Unveiling the ‘System of Nature’
• 1. The problem of classification.
• 2. Classificatory disputes on botanical and zoological arrangements.
• 3. Linnean systematics.
• 4. Systems and methods. mid century debates.
• 5. Maps, series and trees: Images of natural relationship.
Species, time and history
• 1. Species and generation: early modern reflections.
• 2. Cartesian history of Nature.
• 3. Fossils and figured stones.
• 4. Species and the theory of the Earth.
• 5. Buffon’s new methodology for natural history.
• 6. Species and history.
• 7. The Époques of Nature.
From animated anatomy to the sciences of vital forces
• 1. The disciplinary development of physiology
• 2. Anatomical observation and its representation
• 3. The discipline of observation and experiment
• 4. Experimental techniques
• 5. Analogies and models
Late iatromechanism and animism: Boerhaave, Hoffmann, Stahl
• 1. From microstructuralism to the great systems of iatromechanism
• 2. Boerhaave’s programmatic synthesis
• 3. The revised and systematized micromechanistic paradigm: Hoffmann
• 4. Stahl’s theory of the organism