Andrea Cesalpino
Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603) was an influential Italian physician and botanist, recognized primarily for his contributions to botany rather than medicine. Born to a family of artisans, he studied at the University of Pisa, where he was exposed to prominent scholars in medicine and botany, including Luca Ghini, who established one of the first botanical gardens. Cesalpino earned a medical degree and became a professor, later directing the botanical garden. His notable work includes "De plantis," published in 1583, where he classified about 1,500 plant species based on structure rather than medicinal use, laying groundwork for later botanical classification systems.
Although he proposed an early theory of blood circulation in 1571, his lack of empirical evidence meant credit for this discovery ultimately went to William Harvey. Cesalpino's career was marked by tension with conservative authorities, leading him to leave Pisa for a professorship in Rome, where he also served as personal physician to Pope Clement VIII. Cesalpino's legacy endures through his impact on botanical taxonomy, with later botanists like Linnaeus acknowledging his foundational contributions. The Caesalpinia genus, named in his honor, serves as a testament to his lasting influence in the field of botany.
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Andrea Cesalpino
Italian botanist and physician
- Born: Probably June 5, 1525
- Birthplace: Arezzo, Tuscany (now in Italy)
- Died: February 23 or March 15, 1603
- Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)
Cesalpino systematized botanical classification, wrote the first true textbook in botany, and founded the taxonomical movement, which reached its apex in the work of Linnaeus. Cesalpino’s speculation into the anatomy and physiology of the heart anticipated William Harvey’s conclusions about the circulation of the blood.
Early Life
Andrea Cesalpino (ahn-DREH-ah chay-zahl-PEE-noh) was the son of a successful artisan, Giovanni de Andrea Cesalpino. As a medical student at the University of Pisa, Cesalpino benefited from some of the world’s best professors of medicine, botany, and Aristotelian philosophy.
His botany professor was Luca Ghini, who founded in 1543 the Orto Botanico di Pisa (the Botanical Garden of Pisa), one of the earliest major botanical gardens dedicated to academic purposes. He learned anatomy from Realdo Colombo, author of De re anatomica (anatomical matters), which in 1559 included the earliest description of pulmonary circulation. Guido Guidi, an expert on fractures and dislocations and the discoverer of several anatomical features, taught him surgery and medicine.
Cesalpino received a medical degree and a doctorate in 1551, practiced medicine in Pisa until 1555, became professor of materia medica (medical substances) at the university, and succeeded Ghini as director of the botanical garden. Among his patients and patrons was Cosimo I de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. In the 1560’s, Cesalpino helped secure for his friend and former student, Michele Mercati, the directorship of the Vatican botanical garden under Pope Pius V.
Life’s Work
In 1571, in Venice, seven years before the birth of William Harvey, Cesalpino published Peripateticarum quæstionum libri quinque (five books of peripatetic questions), in which he announced that the blood circulates, entering the heart from the vena cava and exiting through the aorta, rather than ebbing and flowing from the heart as Galen had believed. Cesalpino did not support his discovery with scientific evidence, so it remained just a theory. So Harvey rightfully received credit for establishing the theory with his landmark empirical study, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (1628; anatomical exercise on the motion of the heart and blood in animals).
Cesalpino’s second work on the philosophy of medicine, Daemonum investigatio peripatetica (peripatetic investigation of demons), appeared in 1580 in Florence and in 1593 in Venice. He analyzed the spiritual dimension of medicine from Hippocrates to his own day, with frequent sympathetic reference to magic, alchemy, and witchcraft. In the first edition, he tended to accept traditional superstitions about demonic possession, even though he urged that it be treated as a medical disorder. In the second edition, he relied more systematically on Aristotelian philosophical method and Hippocratic medicine to suggest a synthesis of these approaches with Roman Catholic teaching about the effects of demons on the human body and spirit.
Cesalpino published his multivolume masterpiece, De plantis (books about plants), in Florence in 1583. The first of sixteen “books” derives from Aristotle and Aristotle’s student, Theophrastus, expounding Cesalpino’s principles for grouping plants. The other fifteen books describe and classify about fifteen hundred species within four main groups: trees, shrubs, undergrowth, and herbs. He departed from contemporary tendencies by grouping plants according to their structure rather than their medicinal properties or other practical uses.
As professor of medicine at Pisa starting in 1569, Cesalpino’s naturalism, heterodoxy, and Aristotelianism came under the increasing scrutiny of conservative Roman Catholic officials. Although Duke Cosimo’s successor sons, grand dukes Francesco I de’ Medici and Ferdinand I de’ Medici, were also Cesalpino’s patients, they grew more suspicious of his philosophy. Cesalpino was never charged with heresy, but gradually he became less welcome in Pisa. In 1589, Ferdinand appointed a junior member of the medical faculty at a salary substantially higher than Cesalpino’s. From that point Cesalpino was determined to leave Tuscany. Michele Mercati interceded with Pope Sixtus V on his teacher’s behalf. In 1592, Cesalpino became professor of medicine at the University of Rome, Sapienza, and the next year succeeded Mercati as personal physician to Pope Clement VIII. He remained in both posts until his death in 1603.
His De metallicis libri tres (three books on metals), published in Rome in 1596 and in Nuremberg in 1602, dealt with metallurgy, chemistry, and geology. It contains still-valuable information about Italian ores, rocks, and soils, as well as observations about fossils, crystals, minerals, and magnets.
Cesalpino’s last works concerned the clinical practice of medicine. In 1597, some of his philosophical and medical advice was collected with that of six other authors in Risposta di Hieronimo Veneroso nobile Genovese alla querela sotto nome di Difesa intorno allo sputo di Sangue (the answer of Genoese nobleman Girolamo Veneroso Lomellino to the complaint, called a defense, about the bloody sputum). In 1602, Cesalpino published the first volume of a projected multivolume treatise, Artis medicae pars prima: De morbis universalibus (the art of medicine, part one: on diseases in general), which covered mostly fevers, gynecological ailments, and sexually transmitted diseases. The next installment, Artis medicae liber VII: De morbis ventris (the art of medicine, book seven, on diseases of the stomach), appeared in 1603 and addressed many disorders of the abdomen, including gynecological concerns. A revision of the 1602 work, Katoptron sive speculum artis medicae Hippocraticum (a mirror on the Hippocratic medical arts) appeared posthumously in Frankfurt in 1605. Also posthumously, and with much overlapping of his previous works, Praxis universae artis medicae (practice of the general art of medicine) was published in 1606.
Significance
Cesalpino’s greatest importance is for botany, not medicine, since Harvey deserves most of the credit for revolutionizing physiology by discovering, through empirical study and not just through theory, the circulation of the blood. A few historians of medicine, notably Giovanni Arcieri and Mark Clark, value Cesalpino’s contributions to medicine more highly, but historians of science who appreciate the pedigree of Linnaean taxonomy esteem Cesalpino as the progenitor of that mode of thought. All interpreters agree that Cesalpino’s work in botany was more empirical than his work in medicine or physiology and that he was the first to devise useful generalizations about plants according to the Aristotelian concepts of genus and species.
Benjamin Smith Barton, a professor of medical botany at the University of Pennsylvania, disciple of Linnaeus, and author of the first American botanical textbook, Elements of Botany (1803), explicitly praised Cesalpino as the founder of botanic classification. Barton classified the classifiers according to their method. Cesalpino was a fructist; that is, he classified plants by the qualities of their fruit. By contrast, Barton and Linnaeus were sexualists, classifying plants by their means and structures of reproduction.
French botanist Charles Plumier (1646-1704) honored Cesalpino by naming a New World tropical shrub genus Caesalpinia. In the modern Linnaean system, this genus of useful and ornamental plants is in the subfamily Caesalpinioideae of the family Caesalpiniaceae and contains more than 160 species and cultivars of evergreen and deciduous shrubs, trees, and vines.
Bibliography
Arcieri, Giovanni P. The Circulation of the Blood and Andrea Cesalpino of Arezzo. New York: S. F. Vanni, 1945. Standard but controversial source for information about Cesalpino’s work in physiology. Argues that Cesalpino deserves more credit than Harvey for discovering the circulation of the blood.
Clark, Mark Edward, Stephen A. Nimis, and George R. Rochefort. “Andreas Cesalpino, Quæstionum peripateticarum, libri V, liber v, quaestio iv, With Translation.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 33 (1978): 185-213. Presentation of Cesalpino’s work on the circulation of the blood.
Clark, Mark Edward, and Kirk M. Summers. “Hippocratic Medicine and Aristotelian Science in the Daemonum investigatio peripatetica of Andrea Cesalpino.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 69, no. 4 (Winter, 1995): 527-541. A comparison of the two editions of Cesalpino’s book about demonic possession.
Considerations About Cesalpinus’ and Harvey’s Works on the Blood Circulation Discovery. New York: Alcmaeon, 1964. Illustrated collection of reviews and critiques of Arcieri’s research.
Fye, W. Bruce. “Andrea Cesalpino.” Clinical Cardiology 19 (1996): 969-970. Brief appreciation of Cesalpino’s significance in the history of heart physiology. Includes portrait.
Griffiths, Mark. Language of Life. London: HarperCollins, 2003. General history of the development of botanic classification.
Isely, Duane. One Hundred and One Botanists. Ames: Iowa State University, 1994. Good scholarly biographical introduction to the leading figures in botany.