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

position. 43
Locating Milton’s work in relation to contemporary philosophical and
theological debates provoked by the mechanist theories of Descartes and Hobbes, as
well as the less dualistic stance taken by the Cambridge Platonists More and Cudworth,
Fallon explicates the way that Milton’s animist materialism compares to that of Hobbes
but finds as well a theological analogue in the Augustinian tradition of evil as
ontological deprivation. My study everywhere presupposes and relies upon the work
Fallon has done on Milton’s monism in humans, angels and the natural world, while
exploring it in relation to Milton’s Aristotelianism (which Fallon only touches on) and a
particular set of medical theories that were at the forefront of experiment and research in
the contemporary natural philosophy of the animate body.
While Svensen’s Milton and Science remains the foundational work on Milton
and medicine, his attribution to Milton of a backward and stolid medical science has
been challenged more recently by John Rogers. Rogers has made an innovative
contribution to the study of Milton’s natural philosophy; building on the work of
Christopher Hill, which initiated serious scholarly interest in Milton’s radicalism,
Rogers includes Milton’s Paradise Lost in his study of what he terms the ‘Vitalist
Moment’ in the natural philosophy of the Interregnum. Rogers reasonably equates
animist materialism with vitalist natural philosophy, observing that it
holds in its tamest manifestation the inseparability of body and soul
and, in its boldest, the infusion of all material substance with the
power of reason and self motion. Energy and spirit, no longer
immaterial, is seen as immanent within bodily matter, and even nonorganic
matter, at least for some vitalists, is thought to contain within
it agents of motion and change. 44
What Rogers offers in particular is a re-invigorated study of the notion of the body
politic, one which takes up the links between contemporary chymistry and
contemporary political radicalism and rereads the long-noted ‘alchemical’ motifs of
Milton’s greatest poetry in the light of this contemporary explosion of radical natural
philosophy and medicine. He observes that in contemporary medical science
The brain, the heart, the stomach – all the traditional centres of bodily
control – are dethroned as the agents of the body’s government. In
their place rise the random, disparate masses of body tissue that find
43 Stephen Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century
England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
44 Rogers, Matter of Revolution, 1-2.
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