PREMISES FOR A PHANTOM EMBRYOLOGY

Questions connected to generation are on the whole extraneous to the genuine study of medicine. They should therefore be dealt with summarily, and only because of their repercussions in prevention or cure. Such is Georg Ernst Stahl's firm belief. If, however, the author of Theoria medica vera really did attribute such a limited importance to the question, why, in the first decade of the eighteenth century did a debate emerge on the explanatory validity and meaning of Stahl's embryology? What were the various significations imputed to the dictum of the “Beacon of Halle University”? This essay is an attempt to reconstruct Stahl's position with regard to the problems of generation and trace the history of its interpretation in the first phase of the debate, from 1708 (the year of the publication of Theoria medica vera) to 1734 (the year of Stahl's death).

Stahl believed that the medical discipline should exclude anything that did not help the physician attain his immediate professional goal: keeping people healthy or helping them regain their health. This is why, though a chemist of some note, he considered almost every notion provided by chemistry or anatomy as superfluous to medicine.