La ‘force de l’imagination’. Jean-Robert Chouet e una guarigione straordinaria - un manoscritto ritrovato

This article examines Jean-Robert Chouet’s unpublished Discours sur la maladie extraordinaire de la fille de Mad.e de St. Cosme, written in 1671. The manuscript, previously thought to be lost, was found at the Bibliothèque Carré d’Art in Nîmes. In this Discours, Chouet treats a particularly unusual medical case, drawing on the mechanistic physiology outlined by René Descartes in L’Homme and further developed by Louis de La Forge. In the context of the seventeenth-century debates on the power of the imagination, Chouet’s analysis is an important illustration of the role played by imagination in illness and healing, and how Cartesian physiology could be used to understand psychosomatic illnesses.