Publications

Publication details [#13354]

Ishizuka, Hisao. 2012. ‘Fibre Body’: The Concept of Fibre in Eighteenth-century Medicine, c.1700–40. Medical History 56 (4) : 562–584. 23 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press

Abstract

This paper treats the concept of “fibre” as this was used in Eighteenth-century Medicine, especially by iatromechanists from c. 1700 to c. 1740. The study sheds light on the way the body was understood and experienced i.e. its physical form and the humors or else "fluids", namely blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The writer stresses the fact that, initially, the concept of the body in anatomy, physiology, pathology etc. was determined by the traditional socio-cosmological theories of that time. Moreover, the paper examines the metaphorical conceptualization of the fibre as an indispensable part of fibre medicine. However, with the passage of time a turn was realized from humoralism to solidism changing the way medical historians described it.