John Slater, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures
Colorado State University
About the speaker
John Slater joined the faculty at Colorado State University in 2020, after working at the University of California, Davis and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published about early modern literature natural history, medicine, and alchemy. Most recently, he and María Luz López Terrada co-edited of a section of the online encyclopedia Saberes en acción dedicated to science and literature. López Terrada and Slater are at work on a book-length introduction to literature and medicine, which focuses on early modern Spain.
Sacred Letters, Volatilized Spirits: Towards a Reassessment of the History of Physiology in Spain
Juan Eusebio Nieremberg was, according to Menédez y Pelayo, one of the greatest prose stylists of the seventeenth century. He remains one of the bestselling: Nieremberg’s De la diferencia entre lo temporal y eterno (1640)—in translations from Welsh to Guaraní—has never gone out of print. Nieremberg was also a great popularizer of scientific ideas and one of his favorite authors was Libavius (Andreas Libau, 1550-1616), a key figure in early chemistry. As José Pardo Tomás explained, all of Libavius’s works in their entirety were altogether prohibited in the index of 1632. A year later, Nieremberg’s Oculta filosofía would not only cite Libavius by name but also paraphrase long passages of his Singularia (1601). In so doing, Nieremberg participated in a robust tradition within devotional literature and sacred oratory: disseminating the alchemical concepts widely associated with German protestants.
This talk examines a key area of Nieremberg’s interest in early chemistry: chemical explanations of the water cycle. Physicians and natural philosophers who were influenced by early chemistry believed that macrocosmic explanations of the evaporation and condensation of water could, by analogy, be used to explain human physiology. William Harvey, credited with the discovery of the circulation of the blood, is a notable exponent. One of the most powerful heuristics for explaining this constant rise and fall of substances in nature and within the body was the alembic used distill spirits. Early modern Spanish authors such as Nieremberg often compared the operations of the body to the heating and rising, cooling and falling that happens during the process of distilling with an alembic. The significance of this analogy—that both the body and nature could be understood in terms of a distillation apparatus—has been overlooked. Harvey used these very images to explain the circulation of the blood.
This paper argues that the abundant references to distillatory apparatuses in prose works by the most significant religious authors of the seventeenth century—from Nieremberg to Barcia y Zambrana—and the use of these references to explain human physiology permit two conclusions. First, the frequency with which bodily functions are represented in terms of an alembic or alquitara suggests that the tools of chemical analysis were the primary technological model many Spanish authors used to understand human physiology. This was an implicit rejection of classical physiological models, such as those of Galen. Second, the question of whether or not Harvey’s particular explanation of the circulation of the blood was widely accepted in Spain tends not to matter when the underlying physiological model—in which bodily functions are analogous to the water cycle—is widely endorsed. In fact, we can go much further and say that both Harvey and Nieremberg explained physiology in the same terms: as akin to a process of chemical refinement accomplished with an alembic. The Spanish body is not mechanized, as Descartes would have it; instead it is volatilized, as through the distillation of spirits. The alembic demonstrated how.
An introduction to distillation techniques