Contents -- Introduction -- Claire Crignon, Carsten Zelle, Nunzio Allocca -- I. THE DISPUTE BETWEEN METAPHYSICS AND EMPIRICISM -- The Debate about methodus medendi during the SecondHalf of the Seventeenth Century in England: ModernPhilosophical Readings of Classical Medical Empiricismin Bacon, Nedham, Willis and Boyle -- Claire Crignon -- The Status of Leibniz' Medical Experiments:A Provisional Empiricism? -- Anne-Lise Rey -- Whytt and the Idea of Power:Physiological Evidence as a Challenge to the Eighteenth-Century Criticism of the Notion of Power -- Claire Etchegaray -- II. ARTS OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH -- Learning to Read Nature:Francis Bacon's Notion of Experiential Literacy(Experientia Literata) -- Guido Giglioni -- Of Snails and Horsetails:Anatomical Empiricism in the Early Modern Period -- Domenico Bertoloni Meli -- III. RELEVANCE OF CASE STUDIES -- Experiment, Observation, Self-observation.Empiricism and the 'Reasonable Physicians' of theEarly Enlightenment -- Carsten Zelle -- Writing Cases and Casuistic Reasoning in Karl PhilippMoritz' Journal of Empirical Psychology -- Yvonne Wübben -- Indices.