Images of the body and medical scholarship in sixteenth-century Portugal

Abstract

The article is concerned with a number of linguistic devices and analytical procedures by means of which the human body and its parts are described and explained in sixteenth-century Portuguese texts, particularly medical treatises. These representations involve the use, by analogical reasoning, of images derived from features of society or general human experience. It is contended that the way thinkers rely on analogical argument can offer insight into their relationship with intellectual trends of the time, among them Renaissance humanism, scholasticism and the empirical current which emerged in the early modern period.

Images of the body; Medical Scholarship; Renaissance Portugal