Dissertation Research -- Animal Experiments in 17th Century Italy

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Introduction: This project will investigate the relationship between the Medici court and the rise of a specific culture of animal experimentation. The time period will cover from 1654 (the year in which Leopoldo dei Medici founded the Accademia del Cimento) to 1694 (the year in which Francesco Redi, the most prominent naturalist at the Medici court, died). The seventeenth century is an important period for physiological research. With the publication of De motu cordis in 1628, William Harvey not only claimed the discovery of the circulation of blood, but also established a new experimental approach.Intellectual Merit: Questions concerning animal experimentation are and will continue to be pervasive in the contemporary research environment. One way to develop a deeper understanding of what's involved in these questions is to develop a well informed history of this mode of research. What will likely emerge from it are valuable historical lessons as to how the context of that research has dramatically changed over time. One consequence will be an enhanced ability to challenge the predominant twentieth century story of "lab animals" as important machines for human exploration, which clearly depends on a simplistic story of human/animal relationships described in terms of superiority and domination. An alternative view will be developed in the project that provides a deeper understanding of why we can describe animals as machines inside the laboratory; something happened in the history of the relationship between human and animals outside those rooms. In the project, animal experimentation is studied as a practice strongly related to the broader history of human-nonhuman relationships. By connecting the meaning and the role of the bodies of the researchers and the animal when they are inside and outside of the laboratory makes it is possible to understand the relationship between the experimental practices and the society in which these practices are born. Broader Impacts: The philosophical, social and religious categories used to discuss animal experimentation all have precise historical origins and only in recovering these roots we will be able not only to have a better understanding of the debate, but also to harmonize all these voices finding a new way to interact with the animals.Funds for this project were provided by a joint venture of the BIO and SBE directorates known as "Impacts of Biology on Society," which is administered via the STS program.