macro-iconographic

Updated: May 1, 2025

The empiricism comprising the leitmotif of the macro-iconographic movement then became blended with, or, more often, submerged within, the new variety of rationalism; hence, mechanistic rationalism, divorced entirely or virtually from empiricism, characterizes embryology during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Charles W. Bodemer - Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967

The macro-iconographic era was empirical and based upon first-hand observation; it was concerned more with the facts than with the theories of development. This empiricism existed in competition with a declining, richly vitalistic Aristotelian rationalism which had virtually eliminated empiricism during the scholastic period.

Charles W. Bodemer - Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967