Mechanism, Experiment, Disease

"The strength of Meli's work lies in his attention to detail in highly complex Latin works, and in his sensitivity to unpublished work, correspondence, diaries, and above all, to the technologies of illustration."

"Distinguished as this work was, in Mechanism, Experiment, Disease Domenico Bertoloni Meli maintains there is a great deal more to Marcello Malpighi. In this new book—part biography, part intellectual history of anatomy (the philosophy and mechanics of the body), and part history of medicine in the 17th century—Bertoloni Meli tells readers why. What he does wonderfully is to locate Malpighi as a practicing physician during Italy's scientific revolution. Bertoloni Meli conveys the excitement of the new science, voices the tumult that ensued as opposing schools of thought clashed, and reminds readers that priority disputes are nothing new."

"Bertoloni Meli makes great use of Malpighi's wonderful epistolary consultations to remind readers that boundaries between research and practice have been drawn too sharply by historians. His use of overlooked medical correspondence increases the presence of Malpighi, the medical practitioner, working from bench to bedside four centuries before translational research hit the headlines."

"The most comprehensive account to date of the works of Marcello Malpighi."

"Bertoloni Meli's book is a very valuable and welcome contribution to the ongoing reassessment of the Scientific Revolution as a manifold process that involved all areas of natural knowledge—from physics to medicine—and reconfigured each and their mutual relations."

"Among the many lessons to be taken from Domenico Bertoloni Meli's carefully researched, persuasive and, at times, beautifully rendered book is that the life sciences in the early modern period must be studied with an eye to the history of science, medicine and philosophy... There is too much to praise and to learn from Meli's book to do it justice in a short review such as this. For several years now his work has represented a vital and inspiring force in the history medicine, and Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy in particular will enliven the study of early modern medicine in ways we cannot pretend to anticipate. But one thing we are confident about is that Meli's latest book should shape the new work to be done on eighteenth-century notions of mechanism, the emergence of pathology, and the history of visualization and its practices."