Physiological Self-Regulation: The Eighteenth-Century Modernization of the Human Body

❦Long neglected in the history of ideas, one leading science in the age of Enlightenment was physiology. It was an area for tremendous innovation, not only affecting medical-anthropological knowledge in the narrow sense but also the age’s cognitive and social doctrine. This, in turn, left an influence on the great complex of subject- and system-centered philosophies unfolding in Germany around 1800. For the drastic changes unfolding in the previous decades with regard to doctrines of the human body proceeded on various levels and involved disparate realms, in a modern scientific landscape gaining contour at that time. The following discussion represents an effort to describe some of the main features of this landscape. 1 I. The Turn from Humoral Pathology. Whatever differing notions were at work in individual cases, traditional European medicine generally conceived of the human body as a receptacle filled with fluids: the well-known humors. Corresponding to the body’s common division into three zones (head, torso, and lower body) with three correlative realms of the soul, these fluids were differentiated according to rank. The finest, most noble substances 1