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central square of that Dutch city today, separated from its cathedral by a wide swath of paving stones. The explanation for this anomaly is that the nave that connected the two structures collapsed during a violent storm in 1674 and was never rebuilt. With this exception, the exquisitely preserved old city center, with its sunken canals, twisty streets, and gabled brick façades, is not so different from the way it would have appeared in the year 1638, when a bluff forty-year-old medical doctor named Hendrik de Roy—who was known by the Latinized form of his name, Regius—swept determinedly into the building connected to the cathedral, the newly christened Utrecht University, to take up his duties as a professor.
    Shortly after, Regius penned a letter to René Descartes, whom he had never met but who was then living in the village of Santpoort, forty miles away (for most of his career Descartes lived in the Dutch provinces, to which he was attracted by the comparatively greater atmosphere of intellectual freedom). Regius wanted to thank Descartes, for, he said, he owed his appointment to the newly created chair in medicine to the Frenchman. Regius had read the
Discourse on the Method
when it came out the year before, including the accompanying essays on optics and meteorology, and the book had changed his world. He had previously been teaching private lessons in physics; after reading the
Discourse
he revamped his whole approach, and now his lectures were packed with students intrigued by this new way of understanding the body and, for that matter, the universe. The regents of the university took note; Regius believed that the popularity of the courses had led to his promotion.
    Regius asked Descartes to accept him as his “disciple.” Descartes was delighted: he was highly susceptible to flattery, and besides that this was the type of response he needed if his work was to have an impact. Although initial sales of the
Discourse
were modest (sounding a note in harmony with authors of all eras, Descartes whined that the print run wasn’t selling out, so he doubted there would be reprints), the book was being read, and he was in the process of moving from obscurity to intellectual celebrity. His name was being uttered in universities, churches, taverns, and cafés. The chattering classes of seventeenth-century Europe were writing to one another and to him using shameless superlatives, referring to him as “this great man,” “the Archimedes of our time,” “greatest of all philosophers,” and “mighty Atlas, who supports the heavenly firmament, not with raised shoulders, but by the firm reasoning of [his] magnificent mind.” The interest was in, as Regius put it, “this excellent method” that Descartes had discovered “for conducting reason in the search for all sorts of truths.”
    Descartes was by now formulating his goal in life, which was nothing less than to supplant Aristotle as the basis for education. It was an almost laughably grandiose ambition, far greater than that of Galileo or Leonardo or even Aristotle himself, who after all did not think he was laying the intellectual framework for centuries of human history. Not to put too fine a point on it, Descartes wanted to reorient the way every human being thought. And he knew you didn’t do that by writing a book or two and giving some lectures. If his philosophy was to be adopted he had to build a network: to win over influential professors, church officials, university overseers, and government leaders. This process would start with Regius.
    Regius was keen to promote Cartesianism; with Descartes’ blessing, he gave a series of formal disputations on the subject at the university. Since he was a professor of medicine, the theme was “the science of health”—a title that in itself denoted the clinical approach he would present. He seems to have built up the drama, and the