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294 Germano Maifreda

political sciences can admit [its use] up to a certain point. They deal with the
debts and credits of a nation, with taxes, etc.; things which allow calculations
and notions of quantity. I said up to a point, because political principles, de-
pending in great part upon the outcome of many, particular, decisions and
very varied passions (which cannot be determined with precision), policy con-
structed on numbers and calculations would be ridiculous and more
52
[appropriate] for the inhabitants of the island of Laputa than our Europeans .
The skepticism on the results of the formalizing of culture regarding
society was, in other famous pages of Il Caffè, bolstered by Pietro
Verri’s implacable demolition of the scientific pretenses of contemporary
medical culture. Opening an ample and acute historical and philosophic
study on this very touchy subject, The Medicine (‘La medicina’), he
once again anchored his discussion to questions of scientific method.
«Medicine is nothing but physics applied to the human body, that is to
the machine which even today is very imperfectly known and may per-
haps never be so in all its extension» .
53
The mechanistic metaphors do not, however, take on here the usual
task of simplification and the tranquilizing functions of schematization
which they so frequently assume in 18th century medical texts.

For if the veil which hides from us the principles due to which a healthy
body lives, moves, generates, nourishes itself – that is to say, a body in the
state in which it is proper to subject it to the greatest number of observations,
for it is the condition common to the greater part of mankind - is so dense, so
much the more must you believe the principles which distort the order of
animal economy and make mankind pass out of a healthy into an unwell
54
state to be obscure! .
From these reflections, supported by robust injections of empiric
evidence and free of any awe of the auctoritates dutifully cited, Verri
briskly draws his conclusions:

[…] a consequence: and that is, medicine will always be very uncertain
both in its principles and in the application of these same principles; and a
philosopher who makes this his profession, when he has adhered to the most
scrupulous diligence in specific cases, will have a cautious doubt as his
constant companion and a reasonable Pyrrhonism which will lead him always

52 FR1, 173-4. Laputa is a flying island of which we read in the Third Part of The
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Jonathan Swift (1726); it is
inhabited by extremely learned physicists, mathematicians and musicians.
53 FR1, 200-11, 201.
54 Ibid., 201.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XV - Agosto 2018 n.43
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)