"Modèles, systèmes et métaphores du vivant, de Descartes à Barthez"

What metaphor for life in the 17th century? Mechanism As J. Roger rightly pointed out in a now classic book, at the end of the Grand Siècle and the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, in the field of life sciences, ‘everything that matters is mechanistic...’ The victory of this approach to the phenomena of life throughout the 17th century was very difficult, but it was not solely due to Descartes, the ‘prince’ of mechanistic philosophers. The situation is much more complex. Until the time of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), doctors continued to be divided into two camps that were not always opposed. On one side were the followers of Galen of Pergamon (129-201 AD), the Galenists, with different theoretical and practical variations; on the other were the supporters of Aristotle (De part. animalium, Hist. an), who were in the majority. What united the community – but was also, at times, a source of division – was respect for the authority of Hippocrates, who was held in high esteem by both parties. It was a scholastic, erudite form of medicine, far removed from what we now call ‘clinical medicine’. For a millennium and more, European and Arab physicians were divided on this schism between scholastic medicine and the four ‘humours’ (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, or atrabile), which reflected, in the microcosm of living beings, the grand order of the physical macrocosm, whose elements, since the pre-Socratics, were four: air, fire, earth and water. In a medical context, these elements were also broken down into four more general ‘qualities’ that became operational: heat (Hot) and humidity (Wet), cold (Cold) and dryness (Dry).