The fourth week of the semester is already here (the semester is, I must keep reminding myself, only 11 weeks long)!
Despite the passage of time, I have finally begun serious work on my dissertation (or 'thesis' as the Brits would have it). The good news is I'm approaching an area that I'm quite fascinated by and should hold my interest over the next few years. The bad news is that doing a good job will require great demands from my French, German and Latin—demands that they are likely not yet able to answer. So much linguistic practice is called for!
I'm particularly interested in debates about the nature of the soul and the relation between the soul/mind and the body in the late 17th and early-to-mid 18th centuries in Europe (especially Scotland and Germany). For whatever reason, I'm drawn toward the figure of Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) who spent most of his life as a professor in Halle and then as court physician in Berlin. Today he is best known for his phlogiston theory but he also had fascinating things to say about the nature of the soul. Essentially, he rejected the contemporary pressures of materialism and mechanism and developed a fairly robust theory—or set of theories—about a human, immaterial soul (the anima). According to Lester King, Stahl argued that "Living creatures can be understood only if we pay attention to their striving toward particular ends or purposes. This striving, in turn, implies a directive agency controlling the goal-seeking effort. The agent is the anima.” His writing—almost all of it in Latin—is complex, wordy and hard to understand. But his influence among physicians and medical theorists was immense.
As far as I know, his magnum opus [Theoria medica vera, physiologiam et pathologiam…sistens (Halle, 1708)] has still not been translated into English. There is also no full-length biography of Stahl in English either, though a biography in German was published in 2002. In short, although Stahl is widely appreciated as an enormously influential figure in eighteenth-century medicine, scholarship—especially in the English-speaking world—does not yet reflect this. Perhaps worth pursuing, then? If so, from what angle?