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

consideration of the contemporary debate on the penetration of substances; in direct
conflict with both Aristotelian orthodoxy and the emerging mechanist models, the
material spirits of both Milton and Glisson rely for their vital interactions and
sublimations upon this mutual penetrability.
The final section of chapter 5 investigates the similarities and differences
between ideas of matter in vitalist monism and corpuscular mechanism. The mechanists
are shown to have borrowed much from chymical doctrine, but Milton’s position is
located in the theological connection between vitalism and free will as opposed to the
voluntarist theology that supported the mechanist proponents of active matter. Chapter 6
continues the investigation into corpuscular versions of active matter in the body; the
focus is upon the dualism inherent in the works of Walter Charleton and Thomas Willis
on the corporeal soul. The vitae chorea (dance of life) that Glisson envisages in the vital
interactions of the body’s substances is re-modelled to incorporate the battles between
the (rational) spirit and the flesh that characterise orthodox Pauline dualism. This
discordance is shown to correlate with corruption and increasing distance from God in
Milton’s schema of sprit and matter; it is also correlated with the notion of the
corrupting ferment in medical research. This chapter delineates the differences between
the ferment as productive of perfecting vital heat in the healthy body-soul composite
and the toxic fermentation that brings disease. Once again, Glisson’s work correlates
most closely with Milton’s natural philosophy of spirit and matter, this time because he
differentiates most carefully between the perfecting action of the body’s fluids and
spirits and the corrupting influence of the putrefying ferment. The physiological effects
of the fruit can thus be read through the lens of this theory of poisonous fermentation.
This notion of the ferment itself stands upon various determinants; it retains something
of the Galenic notion of disease as a self-causing imbalance, but it also demonstrates the
contemporary development of ideas of external infection. Like the ferment, the fruit’s
spirits cause a hallucinatory exhilaration of the highest spirits of the body (and thus a
concomitant loss of rationale), which leads to a sulphurous burning of the blood and,
finally, to the build up of stony deposits in the animate body.
Exploring again the literal linkage between matter and spirit in the
macrocosmic Creation and the microcosmic animate body, this chapter shows how
demonic reduction of sulphur and nitre (the ingredients of life) in heaven and hell
parallels the feverish action of the diseased blood in contemporary medicine. The
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