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

on a lack of animal spirits. The change of diagnosis in the anonymous biography (in
which the Galenic treatments were supposed to have increased the blindness by further
reducing the animal spirits) matches this shift.
Thomas Willis, a founder member of the Royal Society and an early pioneer of
the study of neuro-anatomy, was part of a new generation of doctors whose research
synthesised chymistry, corpuscularian doctrine and the Aristotelian and Galenic
foundations of contemporary medicine. He was at the forefront of the new, experimental
philosophy. In his study of the pathology of fever Willis makes a succinct summary of
the shift from one model of causality to another:
it hath been far otherways taught, by the Opinion of the Vulgar, to wit,
that fumes and vapors are raised up from the Chyle, or Humors
growing hot within the Viscera of Concoction, which cloud the
Brain... this Opinion easily falls, since the Circulation of the Blood,
and the more plentiful Suffusion of it on the Brain, have been known;
and that the rather, because a passage from the Stomach into the Head,
thorow so many Inwards, and bony Cloysters, like stops, seem
impervious, or not passable for the sending up of fumes. Without
doubt, much the greatest part of the Humor, with which the Brain is
watered, and the Spirits inhabiting it, over-turned, during Sleep, is
carried by the Arteries, and distilled in immediately from the Mass of
Blood. 54
This shift affects not only the diagnosis of blindness, but also, of course, that of arthritic
complaints such as gout. Instead of anatomically unverifiable floating humours, the
problem must be in the chymical composition of the blood, which does travel through
recognisable passages to the brain. By 1672 and the publication of Thomas Willis’s De
anima brutorum, Willis is elaborating on the ‘modern’ opinion that gout is caused by a
ferment in the blood, and citing the build up of a salty deposit on the joints and a
connected pathological acidity in the juice of the nerves, which activates the disease:
“according to the opinions of... [the] Moderns, it be affirmed, that some impurities
falling off from the heated Blood, and received by the joints, is the material cause of the
54 Thomas Willis, Dr. Willis's practice of physick being the whole works of that renowned and famous
physician, trans. S. Pordage, (London 1684), 91. Willis published his major tracts on fermentation and
fever in Latin in a compendium of 1659; All citations (apart from those to Two Discourses, Pordage’s
translation of De anima brutorum, which is cited as an individual publication as stated above) are taken
here from Samuel’s Pordage’s English translation published some years later in which the tracts remain
individually paginated. For a succinct introduction to Willis’s work and its religious and political
background see, James P B O'Connor, ‘Thomas Willis and the background to Cerebri Anatome’ in
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 96. 3 (2003), 139-143.
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