The music of the pulse in Marsilio Ficino's Timaeus commentary

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) dedicated part of his commentary on the Timaeus to Plato's ideas about human physiology. With few other means of diagnosis at his disposal, Ficino, as a musical healer, developed considerable sensitivity to minute variations of pulse, because they could indicate various types of emotion and disease. This paper aims to answer two central questions: Why does Ficino describe hearing in the way he does and how is it connected with bodily fluids I aim to show how Ficino's account of human physiology is strongly motivated by his interest in healing and spiritual growth. The paper engages with the traditional problems of how perception brings about changes in the perceiver, and how humours are involved in these. It argues that, although Ficino mainly seems to follow the medical tradition, he represented the interaction of hearing and humours in such a way that it offered new theoretical possibilities for music therapy.