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This essay examines the determination by Cartesians to explain the maternal imagination's alleged role in the formation of birthmarks and the changing notion of monstrosity. Cartesians saw the formation of birthmarks as a challenge through which to demonstrate the heuristic capacity of mechanism. Descartes claimed to be able to explain the transmission of a perception from the mother's imagination to the fetus' skin without having recourse to the little pictures postulated by his contemporaries. La Forge offered a detailed account stating that the failure to explain the maternal imagination's impressions would cast doubt on mechanism. Whereas both characterized the birthmark as a deformation or monstrosity in miniature, Malebranche attributed a role to the maternal imagination in fashioning family likenesses. However, he also charged the mother's imagination with the transmission of original sin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two editions of René Descartes's treatise on human physiology were published in the 1660s, more than a decade after his death: Florentius Schuyl's "Renatus Des Cartes de Homine" (1662) and Claude Clerselier's "L'Homme de René Descartes" (1664). The principal difference between them lies in the figures that illustrate the text. Schuyl's figures undermine Descartes's optimism; his anatomical sketches foreground human mortality while his landscapes remind the reader of the fleeting nature of time and the inevitability of death. In contrast, Clerselier's illustrations develop Descartes's comparison of the human body to a machine, which does not live nor, as a result, die. They thus obscure the fate of the author's dead body and in turn pave the way for the resurrection of his "esprit." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the four essays in this issue including one which shows a pattern of acknowledge collaboration between anatomists and mathematicians, and an article which brings to light the theoretical frameworks that informed William Harvey's and Nathaniel Highmore's differing interpretations of their shared experiments with and observation of chick dogs.