The Machine Analogy in Medicine: A Comparative Approach to Leibniz and His Contemporaries
Abstract
This article attempts to determine the methodological implications of the machine analogy in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: deployed to defend different kinds of connections between organic functions and their subordinate structures, the machine analogy receives all of its meaning from the heuristic priority that is assigned to, or withheld from, anatomical research as a component of the medical discipline. In this context, the machine analogy becomes a tool for moderating the opposition between fortuitous and intentional facts and, in the same time, for demonstrating the limits of the explanations collected loosely under the banner of the “Epicureanism”.