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

the all-important “elements of the mixture, as they call them: spirit, oil, water, salt and
dead earth.” 36
This inclusiveness, and in particular the careful combination of
Aristotelian natural philosophy with a new attention to the dynamic matter of the
chymists, matches Milton’s own in both Paradise Lost and the Christian Doctrine.
Milton uses the tropes and ontological categories of natural philosophy and chymistry in
conceiving of the body-soul composite and his work is both Galenic and Aristotelian.
This is often taken as an indication of his lack of scientific awareness: both Galenic
medicine and Aristotelian natural philosophy have too often been perceived by
historians of medicine (and literary critics) as vehicles of backward-looking orthodoxy,
in direct conflict with the radical proto-scientific heroics of figures such as William
Harvey and Robert Boyle. I argue, on the contrary, that this is a reductive position to
take.
Kester Svendsen takes the standard line in his statement that Milton’s “medical
allusions are traditional, even old-fashioned, familiar and acceptable to a midseventeenth-century
reader if not to a late seventeenth century scientist.” 37
This is a
mistake of the literary critic: Svendsen is underestimating the complexity of Milton’s
engagement with natural philosophy; his own investigation often consists of lists of
cross-correlated examples which lack depth of analysis. It is also a mistake of the
historian of science in that Svensen ignores the interplay between the new chymical
philosophy and older modes of understanding embodied ontology; he underestimates
the degree to which the Galenic and Aristotelian basis of seventeenth-century natural
philosophy supported radical experimental enquiry, particularly in the realm of
biological enquiry. The physiological discoveries of now valorised figures such as
William Harvey (as well as more obscure ones such as Francis Glisson) emerged from
an Aristotelian and Galenic basis. There is a distinct match of source and process
between Milton’s vitalistic conception of the body-soul composite and the vitalist
natural philosophies that were emerging from anatomy and medical research at the same
time. Milton is no mechanist, but as Guido Giglioni has observed of the standard critical
approach to Harvey’s natural philosophy: “Starting from the assumption that the
corpuscularian and mechanistic world-view represents the telos towards which
seventeenth-century natural philosophy was irresistibly drawn, it is easy to characterise
36
Anatomia hepatis, 19.
37
Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 210.
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