Cook, Harold J., Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch
Golden Age (2007), 562p.
This study by a leading authority on the history of medicine and science in early
modern Europe, argues that Dutch commerce, rather than the Protestant Reformation,
which has often been credited with inspiring the rise of science in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century, played the key role in promoting the remarkable scientific
discoveries of the period, and that the Dutch Republic was central to the intellectual
movement that has been described as the scientific revolution. Historians have long
argued that Europe’s development of a vigorous network of international trade brought a
flood of new plants, products, goods, technology, medical treatments, and ideas to
Europe that challenged the classical methods of science and medicine and its Aristotelian
emphasis on rooting natural philosophy in its ultimate causes. The growth of
international exchange especially produced a much greater emphasis on the empirical
study of facts and a great deal of work in biological classification and medical
experimentation rather than a search for universal explanatory theories. Cook, however,
goes beyond this emphasis upon the empirical by arguing that a growing materialism
produced the new science of the period. He insists that it was the acquisitiveness of
merchants and their customers that that not only created the demand for new goods, but
also encouraged the development of a broad-based intellectual curiosity that fueled and
supported the scientific revolution. Moreover, the legal and business conventions of
international commerce, which were most highly developed in Europe in the Dutch
Republic during the period, served as an example for the empirical study of nature, the
classification of plants and animals, and for anatomical and medical studies.
According to Cook it was empirical scientific work that produced a new
materialism, which undermined the theological and intellectual certainties espoused by
traditional natural law theologians, moralists and political philosophers. Cook argues that
Descartes developed his materialism to the years he spent in the Dutch Republic through
his study of medicine. Descartes asserted that the mind was a physical entity and thus
moral philosophy was dependent on the physical reality of the body and its social
environment. Dutch political and moral thinkers used the methods of empirical science to
argue that the economic success of the Dutch Republic was evidence for the superiority
of a republican form of government dominated by merchants and industrialists rather than
aristocrats.
While Cook’s book is important for offering a much greater emphasis upon
empirical science for the creation of a new enlightenment political and moral philosophy,
the real joy of the book is in his detailed discussions of what the Dutch learned from the
rest of the world, especially in medicine, botany, and horticulture, and how they applied
this not only in making themselves rich but to the promotion of science and the spread of
curiosity and education among a broad segment of the population through such
innovations as botanical gardens, anatomical theaters, curiosity cabinets, and richly
illustrated atlases and books on the natural world.