“An inquisitive man, considering when and where he liv’d”: Robert Boyle on Santorio Santori and Insensible Perspiration

Over the seventeenth century, Santorio’s Ars de statica medicina (Venice 1614) went through more than twenty editions and various translations. It was one of the most widely read medical texts across Europe, and England was no exception. Although its first English translation appeared only in 1663, natural philosophers, Galenists and Helmontian physicians, and virtuosi often quoted it and its author in different context. As early as 1646, Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica invoked Santorio’s authority to disprove commonly held beliefs such as the poisonous nature of glass, that dead bodies were heavier than living ones, and that animal spirits had no weight, or in the Aristotelian terminology, they were absolutely light: the “statick aphorism of Sanctorius” indicated that heat, cold, and sleep influenced the amount of spirituous exhalations issuing out from the pores of the skin.