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Howard Adelmann’s majestic five volume Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology was published nearly 50 years ago. A mix of paraphrase and translation, as well as extended commentary, Adelmann described Malpighi as “one of the cardinal figures in the history of biology. As we look back over the three centuries that separate him from us, he may, for all his towering stature, at first glance seem a distant figure. And yet he and his work are not so remote after all” (Vol. 1, xxii). Much has changed in the history of biology since Adelmann’s groundbreaking work, and among the many lessons to be taken from Domenico Bertoloni-Meli’s carefully researched, persuasive and, at times, beautifully rendered book is that the life sciences in the early modern period must be studied with an eye to the history of science, medicine and philosophy—i.e., calling Malpighi simply a “biologist” is very liable to mislead. This point, though only implicit in Meli’s choice to study Malpighi “in relation to the medico-anatomical world of his time” (4), indicates the interdisciplinary character of Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy.

In this paper I address Descartes’ use of analogy in physics. First, I introduce Descartes’ hypothetical reasoning, distinguishing between analogy and hypothesis. Second, I examine in detail Descartes’ use of analogy to both discover causes and add plausibility to his hypotheses—even though not always explicitly stated, Descartes’ practice assumes a unified view of the subject matter of physics as the extension of bodies in terms of their size, shape and the motion of their parts. Third, I present Descartes’ unique “philosophy of analogy”, where the absence of analogy serves as a criterion for falsifying proposed explanations in physics. I conclude by defending Descartes’ philosophy of analogy by appeal to the value scientists assign to simplicity in their explanations.

Descartes is well known as a mathematician and natural philosopher. However, none of Descartes's biographers has described the invitation he received in 1633 to fill a chair in theoretical medicine at the University of Bologna, or the fact that he was already sufficiently known and respected for his medical knowledge that the invitation came four years before his first publication. In this note I authenticate and contextualize this event, which I refer to as the ‘Bologna affair’. I transcribe the letter written to the Bolognese Senate announcing efforts to bring Descartes to the university and explain the events that led to Descartes receiving the invitation. While many questions about the Bologna affair cannot be answered because of the paucity of the historical record, I conclude that the event invites us to consider again the larger historiographical issue of how best to integrate the history of medicine with the history of science and philosophy during the early modern period.

In the final paragraph of the Discours de la Methode published in 1637, Descartes "resolved to devote the rest of [his] life to nothing other than trying to acquire some knowledge of nature from which we may derive rules in medicine."' In 1645, with a retrospective air, Descartes wrote to the Marquess of Newcastle, "the preservation of health has always been the principal end of my studies"; and the following year he wrote to Hector-Pierre Chanut that his practical interests resulted in his having "spent much more time" in medical pursuits than most other subjects.2 Descartes' sincerity on these points seems guaranteed by a number of facts surrounding his life. For one, in 1633 the University of Bologna sought him out to fill a vacant chair in theoretical medi cine. Even more impressive, without ever having produced a proper medical text, Descartes generated a school of medical thought promul gated by Dutchmen like Regius, de Raey, Schuyl, and Sylvius. Yet, in spite of Descartes' own declarations and his conspicuous influence on