Distilling Bodies
Distilling Bodies
Leonhard Thurneisser’s Alchemy of Urine and the «Homo Alembicus»
Silvana D'Alessio
11 March 2025 – 5 PM (CEST)
How do you look inside your patients to see what ails them? For the alchemist Leonhard Thurneisser, the answer lay in distilling his patients’ urine.
The long-standing tradition of uroscopy provided precedent for seeing a patient’s state of health reflected in their urine. Paracelsian and other “chemical” approaches emerging in the sixteenth century offered new concepts and techniques for understanding the materiality of health and disease.
hurneisser built on these approaches to develop a vessel for distilling urine that, in his view, mapped onto the human body and made visible its internal processes.
This talk shows how Thurneisser’s analogy between bodily and technical processes offered a new and lucrative diagnostic technique that changed the agencies of patients and practitioners.
I also explore how distillation shaped Thurneisser’s understanding of human health in terms of matter and its transformations, and of the human body’s place in the material world.
About the Speaker ...
Tillmann Taape is a historian of science and medicine.
He is currently a lecturer and researcher at the Charité medical school in Berlin. He has held research fellowships in the UK, the US, and Germany. He was a Senior Editor of the Making and Knowing Project’s criticial digital edition Secrets of Craft and Nature and has published widely on the intersections of medicine, alchemy, and craft in the early modern period.
