Abstract Summary
In 1625, the Protestant thinker Johann Heinrich Alsted defined medicina sacra as “the ability to heal well, deduced from sacred letters.” This definition points to the existence of a widespread early modern project between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries in which physicians and theologians attempted to adduce biblical sanction for medical practices (e.g. surgery or alchemy); retrospectively diagnosed or evaluated treatments in biblical passages; adumbrated medical theory with reference to biblical principles, and combined debates among anatomists and theologians about blood and the body to examine accounts of Christ’s crucifixion. As they wrote, physicians incorporated insights from biblical commentaries, humanism, and emerging critical historical scholarship, while theologians, in turn, consulted works of medicina sacra in hermeneutics handbooks and biblical commentaries. This paper will introduce this complex early modern scholarly project by briefly outlining its origins and evolution between 1550-1700. In doing so, I will emphasize the ways in which medicina sacra resists classification as either a “medical” or “religious” intellectual project. From there, I explore how recovering an early modern form of inquiry like this—that transcends traditional historiographical categories of science, medicine, and religion—forces historians to reassess their own categorization and analysis of scientific and humanistic disciplines. Doing so not only leads to more accurate understanding of the historical relationship between fields of knowledge, but also to acknowledging the ways in which that relationship and its evolution continues to shape our understanding of the ways we categorize knowledge today.
