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

elong to the blood alone.” 48 Harvey made contradictory statements at other times, but
he and those following in his footsteps and developing his theses were some of the most
inventive and experimental of those exploring the implications of where or what spirit
might be if it was not the immaterial principle of the Cambridge Platonists or Cartesian
mechanists. Harvey’s study of animal reproduction had begun to show that the heart and
liver were not formed before traces of blood appeared in the egg, so the Aristotelian
teaching of the primacy of form and the passive, non-active nature of matter was in
question. Increasingly accurate anatomical research had started to build on these
discoveries and alarming evidence was emerging to illustrate that there was no
appreciable difference between human and animal brains. 49 Finally, what J. B. Van
Helmont, the controversial physician and revisionist of Paracelsus, named ‘the madness
of catarrh’, that is the sort of reliance upon models of the bodily humours that we have
seen in Milton’s early diagnoses and treatments, was subject to a new anatomical
precision that showed that there were no passages by which these deleterious humours
could pass from the brain to the eyes or the joints. 50 Walter Pagel’s study of the work of
Van Helmont notes that in his work on the chymical anatomy of the body, Van Helmont
had, “with an imposing array of observations and arguments… demonstrated that this
concept had been based on a humour that did not really exist, on channels freely
invented, and a production and propagation… just as fictitious as the channels along
which it was supposed to travel.” 51
The field of medicine had been thrown wide open,
and into the fray stepped another explanatory system: that of fermentation.
A more ‘modern’ diagnosis than the Galenic one that we have glanced at
would have the anatomical complexity to assume that different bodily cavities (torso
48
William Harvey, The Works of William Harvey. I have used the 1874 edition, ed. R. Willis (Whitefish:
Kessinger Reprints, 2009), 510.
49
This alarming discovery is turned around and used by Willis to argue for the necessary existence of the
immaterial soul. In his dedicatory letter to Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, Willis states that
“Concerning the Soul, I have enter'd upon a great and difficult thing, and full of hazard; where we may
equally fear the Censures of the Church, as the Schools.” Later he notes that: “as we have shewn, by
comparing the Corporeal Soul of the Brute, with the Rational of Man, what vast difference there is
between them, perhaps it might be to the purpose, to compare the Brains of either, and to observe their
differences. But... we have noted little or no difference, in the Head of either, as to the Figures and
Exterior Conformations of the Parts, the Bulk only excepted; that from hence we concluded, the Soul
Common to Man with the Brutes, to be only Corporeal, and immediately to use these Organs.” (Thomas
Willis, Two discourses concerning the soul of brutes which is that of the vital and sensitive of man, trans.
S. Pordage [London, 1683], A2).
50
For an examination of early alchemical revisions of this theory see Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An
Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2 nd edn. (Basel: Karger, 1982),
166-8.
51
Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 137.
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