The making of a Calvinist physician

An important part of nature, being God s Divine craftmanship, is the hu- 

With much admiration Boerhaave spoke about the complicated structure of the individual parts of the body, working together as a whole. He points out that no-one, even if he were to study aU his life, would be able to recreate the tiniest part of the body. Boerhaave points to the processes of digestion and secretion and he argued that God provided the body with many artful mechanisms in order to transform cmde matter into fluids and solids of its own nature nothing is left to chance nothing is redundant or accidental. For this reason Boerhaave told his students that they should worship God, who has ordered these solids and fluid substances in one structure in such a 

Boerhaave s great emphasis on the creation of the whole stmcture of the body at the same time was directed at those who hoped to trace down the cause of the vital interaction of the fluids exclusively in the stmcture of the body (...) or in the fluids alone Although Boerhaave does not mention any names, we can perhaps say that here the later Boerhaave speaks his mind. He does not seek the cause of life in the hydrauhcs of the fluids hke Pitcairne had done, nor in the nature of the particles of the fluids themselves, like Keill had argued. Instead, Boerhaave proposed to keep to the notion that nature has made the body in its entirety previously, and that, once it is so adjusted, one single impulse is given to it which suddenly imparts motion to the whole and causes this to continue. However, Boerhaave did not leave God out of his medicine, for he held that God ultimately is the Father and Keeper of the human race.  

Why then, did Boerhaave advise his smdents to study the body as a machine I would suggest that Boerhaave s Calvinist opinion that man cannot and should not even try to know the first cause of things, led to the idea that 

who is himself subject to change cannot change anything about the immovable laws installed by the unchangeable God. He can only smdy and observe the strucmre of namre, the effects of an incomprehensible cause. 

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