The Medical Context of Descartes’s Dioptrique

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Prior anatomical investigations on the eye, along with medical ideas and practices concerning the eye and vision, were a crucial influence on Descartes’s 1637 Dioptrique, but the precise nature of this has not been examined in fine detail. One aim of this chapter is to supply this. Moreover, the Dioptrique can be read as a medical work itself, at least in some respects. Descartes’s description of lenses as artificial organs whose purpose is to improve and perfect vision has a direct analogue in the description, in contemporaneous surgical works, of artificial devices designed to supply what was lacking in the body due to either accident or nature. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, however, eyeglasses were only beginning to be medicalized, and thus spectacles were either missing from works on medicine and surgery or, indeed, advised against. Descartes’s Dioptrique, therefore, seems to have contributed to the medicalization of spectacles that began to take place in the seventeenth century. Finally, in a letter to Mersenne in January 1630 he wrote that he was seeking to “discover a medicine which is founded on infallible demonstrations”. Descartes believed that his work on improving and perfecting vision via lenses - including his investigations of the shape of the anaclastic - was infallibly demonstrated. Reading the Dioptrique from a medical point of view, then, I suggest that Descartes and others believed that he had achieved this lofty medical ambition in his Dioptrique.