Elliot Mertz

A PhD candidate in history of science, technology, and medicine at Johns Hopkins university, Elliot Mertz is working on his dissertation on metaphysical and epistemological problems in early modern chemical medicine. Focused on a set of chemists in the medical faculty of the Universität Halle in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, he is interested in the ways that these thinkers applied and weighed in on questions of mechanism, entelechy, causation, and mathematics which preoccupied the wider natural-historical landscape of the period. In particular, his work follows his actors as they evaluate solutions to the puzzle of mind-body interaction which emphasized the separation between organic and inorganic systems and which attempted to delineate the methods which could validly be used in each of these domains. Although these vitalist theories, which made use of soul-action and plastic natures, were intended to describe boundaries between the inorganic world and the organic one, the project was supposed to bear fruit especially insofar as it marked the permeable boundaries between the two.