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Reading Il Caffè: scientific method and economic knowledge in the “School of Milan” 295

to omit rather than overdo as he goes about his work. Aspire to this from the
beginning, and know that what has been said perhaps too generically of all
the sciences – that is that their extremes touch and that ignorance is equally
to be found at both ends – is particularly the case for medicine, in which, if
you are mediocre, you think you share nature’s secrets but, as you progress
and examine your notions with deeper analysis, the number of secrets
unveiled declines and you approach learned ignorance; which is waiting as
the career’s final line […]. So medicine is, then, an art whose nature is very
55
circumscribed and merits the name of conjectural which is assigned it .
Verri’s is a praise of doubt and of his Caffè interlocutors, who never
give in to gross skepticism and are always careful to draw constructive
consequences on the formative plane to their epistemological reflections.
Just as Pietro outlines – immediately after the methodological caveat
we have just seen – the formative profile of the good doctor, that is, the
specialist in “the science of conjecture”:

I shall chiefly seek in a young man the preparation for science, that is a
constant intellectual habit of analyzing his own ideas, of defining each word
exactly – forming almost a well-linked chain of his thoughts – so that the
desire for truth remains always stronger in him than the inertia to which,
perhaps more than to other causes, we must attribute the greatest part of the
fallacious argumentations of mankind. If this disposition of the spirit, which
the Scholastics call Logic, is the prime foundation of human cognitions, if this
is the only reserve which can allow us to make progress in all the sciences, all
the more must it be indispensable where the science in question is one of con-
jecture, where the omission of even one item of data, or of a single observation
56
sometimes leads us to perfectly opposite conclusions .
«I shall make here no long pedantic declamations to prove to you
that to cure illness and to reason in medicine we need statics, hydro-
statics, geometry, algebra and all the other fields of mathematics», he
continued, setting aside once again the dubious purpose of pan-for-
malization. «There is certainly a great deal of deception in such argu-
ments, which are repeated by some poets, repeated by some doctors,
and even by some jurists, almost as if their occupations required the
Encyclopédie; what I will say is that notions of universal physics are
necessary, for, as I have already noted, medicine is an application of
57
physics to the human body» . At any rate, nothing is more apt to
bring on a crisis in the traditional separation between theory and
practice than knowledge regarding the body and health:

55 Ibid., 203.
56 Ibid., 203-4.
57 Ibid., 204.

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