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

it was the Interests of the Collegiate Corporation of Physitians, who
lived in ease and Splendour, practising with old Maxims and
Medicines, not to permit a new laborious Sect of Philosophers,
working Knowledge out of the fire, by their Industry and Successes, to
bring a reproach upon them for their Idleness and Superstitious
devotion to their old heathenish Authors. 27
The bitterness of the debate is clear, and the radical religious critique of pagan sources
made by proponents of the chymical art is evident. 28
Practitioners and theorists such as
Paracelsus and later Van Helmont and Fludd combined Christian theology with their
alchemy and experimentation, claiming for example that the separation of substances
functioned as the biblical accounts of creation by separation:
Whereas Galenic doctors usually create their remedies by combining
different substances in order to graduate the qualities of hot and cold,
moist and dry in the compound, he [Paracelsus] devotes himself not to
compounding, but to extracting. He aims at separating what is already
present in matter rather than creating something that does not exist in
nature. In his conception alchemical scheidung also assumes a
religious significance: the doctor… simply re-enacts, in an earthly
dimension, the original scheidung of beings according to Genesis. 29
Much emphasis and support were lent to the proponents of the ‘philosophy of fire’ by
idealistic members of the Hartlib circle and religious enthusiasts. The process of
purification was going to reverse the effects of the Fall itself. Working amidst these
debates was Paget’s one time colleague, Francis Glisson, Regius Professor of Physic at
Cambridge University, Fellow of the College of Physicians and early member of both
the “1645 group” and the Royal Society. In the struggle between orthodox Aristotelian
natural philosophy and the new spagyrical philosophy of fire that raged around him,
Glisson worked hard to find a middle ground. 30
In 1654 he defended traditional
medicine, whilst simultaneously proposing the chymical elements as the ultimate
components of the universe, declaring that Galen’s four humours were “idly clamoured
by divers chemists upon the mistake that they contradict their 5 principles. Which
27
Marchamont Nedham, Medela Medicinae, A Plea for the Free Profession, and a Renovation of the Art
of Physic (London, 1665), 9.
28
For a detailed account of the earlier medical debates of the 1620s that shows the interconnection of
experimentalism, medicine, chemical philosophy and religious doctrine between Mersenne and Gassendi
in France and Robert Fludd in England, see Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian
Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1977), 1:
260-279.
29
M.L.Bianchi, ‘The Visible and the Invisible. From Alchemy to Paracelsus’, in Alchemy and Chemistry
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. P. Rattansi and A. Clercuzio (London: Kluwer, 1994), 17-
50, 21.
30
Probably of Paracelsian coinage, ‘spagirical’ philosophy is the philosophy of alchemy.
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