A Medicine in the Shadows. The Bio-Medical Manuscripts and a Compendium Descartes Never Published

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In this chapter, I investigate the Observationum anatomicarum Compendium de partibus inferiori ventre contentis, a medical compendium collected in the Excerpta anatomica. Likely written in 1637, this text contains a philosophical investigation of the anatomy and physiology of the organs of the abdomen, an under-studied topic in Descartes’s early medical work, and possibly the subject of a letter he wrote to Huygens by the end of 1637. I contextualize the Compendium within Descartes’s manuscript, before commenting on its text in detail and providing an English translation of it. However, although this text surfaces as a coherent description of the organs of the abdomen, it presents several problems: its relationship with contemporary medicine, with Descartes’s medical collaborators, and, last but not least, the fact that Descartes never mentioned this text again, nor used it in his late physiology. In this sense, it emerges as an example of Descartes’s problematic approach to medicine.