An Extraordinary Decade

The one fact, more than any other, that clearly displays the causal and enduring ideological relationship binding together the Academy's experimental programme and 'soft' scientific disciplines, is the huge mass of tracts of medicine and natural philosophy that came out in the 1660s by authors from Leopoldo's circle. Some of the most important treatises of modern medical history were published in Florence and Bologna between the years 1661 and 1666, beginning with De pulmonibus observationes anatomicae by Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694) and ending with the Esperienze intorno alla generazione degli insetti [Experiences surrounding the procreation of insects] by Francesco Redi. These writings were concerned with subtle and experimental comparative anatomy, and human and animal physiology. Other than the two works mentioned above, the Exercitatio anatomica de structura et usu renum (1662) by Lorenzo Bellini (1643-1704), the Tetras anatomicarum epistolarum de lingua et cerebro (1665) by Malpighi and Carlo Fracassati (1630-1672), the Gustus organum (1665), also by Bellini, and the Canis carchariae dissectum caput (1667) by Nicolas Steno, also deserve to be remembered. Among Malpighi, Fracassati and Bellini, only the latter was a granducal subject, but they all followed Borelli to his research in Pisa. Through Borelli, they appeared more and more often at the Medici Court, absorbing its atmosphere and intellectual exuberance. Inside the rooms of the granducal palace reserved for anatomy demonstrations, and inside the large halls in which the thousands of books that formed the princes' library were amassed, they could use the availability of resources and time to focus on and outline the issues and the problems necessary to give substance to the entire supporting framework of their subsequent, and very rich, medical reflections. During the critical years of the Cimento's existence they were able to test, in the shadow of the activities carried out by their more senior teachers, the value and the efficacy of the principles and methods of traditional knowledge. Nicolas Steno arrived in Tuscany from France in the first months of 1666, already aware of the research habits and the scientific program in Leopoldo's Academy. He immediately entered the Court, developing his arguments and bringing some of his works to maturity in Tuscany. Although no document can attest to his direct participation in the last of the Accademia's meetings, he had contact, and at times also controversies, with some members, and wrote a memorable defence in favour of some experimental descriptions published in the Saggi di naturali esperienze. In Florence in 1667 he published his long thought-out and delayed geometrical description of the structure of muscles of the human body, in which he decided to enclose the narration of a dissection of the head of a shark caught in October 1666 in the waters near Livorno. The study of the animal's teeth was decisive in finally denying, once and for all, the so-called anti-venom properties of the "glossopetra" ["tongue stones": fossils that resembled tongues], identifying these mythical stony materials with the teeth of the shark and demonstrating their organic origins. Francesco Redi also settled into this same line of examination, revision, and on numerous occasions, open retraction of traditional beliefs. From the Accademia del Cimento, Redi inherited the most pure method of investigation and perfect application of the experimental spirit. In 1668, that is, one year after the date when the courtly meetings symbolically ended, Redi published a treatise in Florence on spontaneous generation in the form of a long epistle addressed to Carlo Roberto Dati. As is known, with this work he definitively resolved the question that was for centuries totally framed by theoretical and authoritative thought. Although supported by ample and substantial literary sources, Redi systematically introduced the experimental methodology typical of the Cimento, to biological research. He was the first scientist of his time, surrounded by many contradictors, who managed to cast into doubt all the theories that accredited the possibility of the origin of life to organic material and to putrefied organic substances, while decisively demonstrating their unequivocal sources.