2021 - L'Erma di Bretschneider
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Testing drugs in Giorgio Baglivi's dissertation on Vesicants
P. 271-288
- Discussions on the medical use of vesicants—a remedy able to induce redness and blisters upon application to the skin—attracted the attention of early-modern physicians due to the severe side effects on the body. Helmontian physicians in particular claim that vesicants are always harmful and, therefore, must be prohibited. Giorgio Baglivi (1668-1707), however, believes that vesicants could be useful under certain conditions. His De usu et abusu vesicantium [On the use and misuse of vesicants] aims at analysing exactly the cases in which such an application is permitted, and the cases in which it is not, and to explain how this remedy works.
- For Baglivi experimentation on living animals by means of infusory surgery plays a pivotal role in testing the efficacy of drugs or trying and discovering new ones. In this paper, I will provide a short overview of this undeservedly neglected dissertation, by describing Baglivi's experiments on vesicants and their implications for his medical perspective. [Publisher's text]
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In the same volume
- Foreword
- Notes on contributors
- Scientiae in the history of medicine : an introduction
- The University of Padua Medical School from the origins to the Early Modern Time : a historical overview
- The anatomy theater : towards a performative history
- Sixteenth-century university gardens in a medical and botanical context
- The origin and development of medical museum heritage in Padua
- The science and ethics concerning the legacy of human remains and historical collections : the Gordon Museum of Pathology in London
- Between text and practice : the anatomical injections of Berengario da Carpi
- Sources and resources of court medicine in Mid-Sixteenth Rome : erudition as an epistemological and ethical claim
- The experience of the physician Girolamo Donzellini in the 1575 Venetian plague : between Scientia and heterodoxy
- Pestilence in Renaissance Platonic medicine : from astral causation to pharmacology and treatment
- Elements of Descartes' medical Scientia : books, medical schools, and collaborations
- Testing drugs in Giorgio Baglivi's dissertation on Vesicants
- Tracing Senguerd's footprints : sciences and tarantism at Leiden Universtiy (1667-1715)
- Classifications from an epistemological point of view with particular attention to the classifications of diseases
- List of abstracts
