Aristotle’s framework for natural versus violent death formed the basis of the early modern natural philosophical understanding of the end of life. For Aristotle, violent death was death that occurred when the vital heat of the body was extinguished by a particular disruption, such as fever, illness, or wounds. By contrast, natural death was said to occur when the vital heat expired due to the passage of time. This talk analyzes how understandings of the humoral body were mapped onto this philosophical definition in early modern medical and philosophical literature in the Veneto. I demonstrate that physicians and philosophers agreed that not only was it possible to die of old age, but it was necessary for philosophical, medical, religious, and environmental reasons. For these early modern scholars, old age was the material, embodied reality that remained at the center of natural philosophical discussions of life and death. In the medical and philosophical circles at the University of Padua, the answer to this talk’s central question was clear: Dying of old age was both possible and necessary.
Hannah Marcus is Professor of the History of Science in the Department of the History of Science and the Faculty Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. She is the author of Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and the translator of the sixteenth-century apothecary Camilla Erculiani’s Letters on Natural Philosophy: The Scientific Correspondence of a Sixteenth-Century Pharmacist, with Related Texts (New York: Iter, 2020). Forthcoming projects include a book on the history of old age in early modern Italy titled Methuselah’s Children: The Renaissance Discovery of Old Age and an edited volume with Paula Findlen (Stanford) called Galileo’s Letters: Experiments in Friendship.
