Medical Science and the Anatomia Animata in Milton's Paradise Lost

let the place bee marked lest hee should err; the ulcer shall be kept
open by putting in a pill of gold, silver, lint, of the root of orris,
hermodactiles, gentian, waxe, wherewith some pouder of vitrioll,
mercurie or allum shall be incorporated, lest it should fill up with flesh
sooner than the Physician shall thinke fit. 14
I am going into considerable detail for a number of reasons, but the primary one here is
to try to bring to life something of the actual experiences of those using Galenic
medicine in the seventeenth century. Twenty-first-century medicine has, in Europe at
least, made such stories a distant horror, vaguely noted, but we know that these
treatments were part of Milton’s “perpetual tampering with physic.” The evidence here
shows that, having struggled perpetually with such treatments for more than a decade in
an unsuccessful effort to save his sight, the onset of gout would, in traditional classical
medicine, have prescribed the same treatments over again. Milton, with the help of his
doctor, would – I believe – have researched other bodies of knowledge rather than
repeat again the unsuccessful treatments of the 1640s. This dissertation proposes that
such a painfully embodied existence, and the many efforts made to alleviate the
disability and pain, contributed to Milton’s assertion of the monist system of body and
spirit which characterises his representation of the human body and soul in Paradise
Lost. In short, his animist materialism bears the features of medical knowledge at the
cutting edge of research in the 1650s and 1660s.
There is evidence of a major change of diagnosis that came after the loss of
Milton’s sight. The anonymous biographer, describing the final loss of Milton’s sight in
the midst of polemical duels, remarks defensively
his Eysight totally faild him; not through any immediat or sudden
Judgement, as his adversaries insultingly affirm’d; but from a
weakness which his hard nightly study in his youth had first
occasion’d, and which by degrees had for some time before depriv’d
him of the use of one Ey: And that Issues or Seatons, made use of to
save or retrieve that, were thought by drawing away the Spirits, which
should have supply’d the Optic Vessels, to have hastn’d the loss of the
other. Hee was indeed advis’d by his Physitians of the danger, in his
condition, attending so great intentness as that work requir’d. 15
The same biographer adds later that his blindness ‘proceeded from a Gutta Serena’ but
the previous treatment is now thought to have damaged the sight rather than preserving
14 Paré, Workes, 706.
15 Darbishire, Early Lives, 28.
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