In difesa della "medicina indigena": Sibbald, Baglivi e la metodologia ippocratico-baconiana

The problem of indigeneity and local knowledge in medicine concerns the way in which 17th-century European physicians reacted to the spread of exotic remedies and treatments in official pharmacopoeia and therapeutics. In 1644, the Dutch physician Jan van Beverwyck wrote the first treatise on “indigenous medicine”, Autarkeia Bataviae, sive introductio ad medicinam indigenam, defending the autarkeia, which means the self-sufficiency and independence of Dutch medicine. However, how did this debate develop at the end of the seventeenth century? I will focus my paper, in particular, on Robert Sibbald and Giorgio Baglivi, both supporting, albeit from different viewpoints, the indigenous medicine within a Hippocratic-Baconian methodology. In Scotia Illustrata (1684), Sibbald, just like van Beverwyck, supports a “Scottish” medicine, invoking the same idea of self-sufficiency. In De praxi medica (1696), Baglivi, however, addresses this issue strictly in methodological terms: no matter how convincing theories might be, if physicians ignore geo-climatic factors and the natural history of the “local”, they cannot heal their patients properly.