This essay reconsiders the links between medicine, connoisseurship, and aesthetic theory in early eighteenth-century Britain. Taking a satire on the body of the physician and collector John Woodward as its starting point, I show that medicine and connoisseurship shared a deep preoccupation with the possibility that the animal body could excessively influence the workings of the mind. Pursuing this line of argument, moreover, I will reconsider the place of mind-body dualism in eighteenth-century British medicine and aesthetics. With the exception of materialists such as the philosopher-physician Bernard Mandeville, medics and aesthetic theorists tended to identify the exercise of judgment with the operations of a disembodied mind, unsullied by the embodied mechanisms of the lower body. In practice, however, the insistence that the most refined forms of judgment depended on the presence and activity of a disembodied, immaterial soul was less meaningful than it seems. When confronted by failures of judgment, medics and connoisseurs alike sought explanations in the mechanisms of the animal body. Whether or not they believed in the immateriality of the soul, they pictured the mind as a malfunctioning animal machine, to be cured through the material agency of medical therapeutics.

中文翻译：

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医学、鉴赏和动物身体

本文重新考虑了 18 世纪早期英国的医学、鉴赏和美学理论之间的联系。以对医生和收藏家约翰伍德沃德身体的讽刺为出发点，我表明医学和鉴赏家都深切关注动物身体可能过度影响思想运作的可能性。此外，为了追求这一论点，我将重新考虑身心二元论在 18 世纪英国医学和美学中的地位。除了哲学家兼物理学家伯纳德·曼德维尔 (Bernard Mandeville) 等唯物主义者之外，医学家和美学理论家倾向于将判断力的运用等同于不受下半身具身机制玷污的无肉体心智的运作。然而在实践中，坚持认为最精致的判断形式取决于一个无形的、非物质的灵魂的存在和活动，这并没有看起来那么有意义。当遇到判断失误时，医生和鉴赏家都在寻找动物身体机制的解释。无论他们是否相信灵魂的非物质性，他们都将心灵想象成一个发生故障的动物机器，通过医学治疗的物质媒介来治愈。