I was therefore relieved when Roy Porter consented to replace him. Had he lived to participate in this volume, he would no doubt have performed his task with characteristic brilliance and bravura. If, then, a common theoretical underpinning is perceived to be missing from the ten essays, or if it is adjudged that here less attention is paid to methodology than some readers would like, this derives, in part, as a direct consequence of the death of the first participant-the late Michel Foucault-and as the result of the liberty given to all the participants ensuring that they could follow their own researches.įoucault had agreed to provide a theoretical framework of just the type for which he was deservedly renowned-specifically, to illuminate the semiotics and signposts of mind and body during the Enlightenment.
The team itself was vigilantly selected with regard to disciplinary affinity, national origin, geographical location, and even generational point of view, gender, and methodology: all these to provide balance and variety to an area-the complex relations of mind and body in an epoch of intense intellectual ferment-in which new paths prove hard to find. Yet ultimately the measure of this book's success will be determined by its diverse readership and by the nine contributors, all of whom were willing to take time from their own work and academic-administrative obligations at their home institutions to pursue the common theme of this volume: mind and body during the European Enlightenment. To both these able scholar-administrators-Norman Thrower and D. Had he lived long enough to prepare a volume similar to this one, I know it would have made a significant contribution to the frontiers of knowledge, and although he cannot read this book, I feel certain that he would have encouraged its conception and execution in every possible way. O'Malley would have executed his task with the characteristic dedication and thoroughness for which he was known during his lifetime.
LIFELESS PLANET MAC TORRENT SERIES
O'Malley, a distinguished professor of the history of medicine at UCLA and the author of an important biography of Vesalius, the pioneering Renaissance anatomist, had died in 1969, while in the midst of planning just such a series at theĬlark Library.
More locally in southern California, medicine had been omitted from the Clark Library's programs from the inception of the Clark Professor Series, yet not by design. The mind/body relation inevitably straddles the interstices of the sciences and the humanities: that no-man's-land lying between Scylla and Charybdis-territories still deemed worthy of special study to us today and which we have come to take for granted, yet a relation that was coming into its own during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My own research interests in the relations of science and medicine to the imaginative art forms generated during the Enlightenment were so interdisciplinary that I began to envision ways in which these subjects could be transformed into a useful annual series. Here was a topic that had not been worked over by specialists, or generalists, in the field a topic, moreover, of terrific contemporary impact, as men and women from diverse walks of life wonder how their minds and bodies-surely parts of one, indivisible, holistic unit-ever came to be separated. When Norman Thrower, then the Director of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA, invited me to serve as the Clark Library Professor for 1985-86, I immediately realized that the subject to be privileged should be the mind/body relation viewed within broad cultural and scientific contexts, and against the complexities of Enlightenment theory and practice.
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