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

emaining Pathology, or Method of Curing of the Brain and Nervous
Stock... therefore at present, we shall endeavour to deliver a certain
Doctrine of the Soul 64
Willis is keen to differentiate his study from the accusations of atheism that physic often
attracted. From Thomas Browne’s wry comment upon “the generall scandall of my
profession” through to theatrical conflation of the anatomist and the atheist in
Tourneur’s attempt to imagine a totally amoral character in The Atheist’s Tragedy
(1611) there is, throughout various genres of Renaissance literature, a fascinated
tendency to associate the medical practitioner with a dangerous godlessness. 65
This
tendency still emerges in the modern critical tradition although the ‘atheistic’ attempt to
escape the confines of religious doctrine and taboo is now more often celebrated as a
proto-modern concern with rational thought and scientific rigour, rather than a scandal.
Cudworth, in contrast to Willis’s brief disclaimer, devotes his immense study
to the discovery of scandalous atheism, which, it seems, lurks deviously in almost all
forms of materialist thought, and in particular that which concerns the soul. He is clear
about the relationship between materialist versions of the soul and atheism; modern
atheist doctrine, he states, declares that
life and animality, soul and mind, being all but accidents and
affections in this matter (as if therefore they had no real entity at all in
them), are generable out of nothing, and corruptible into nothing, so
long as the matter, in which they are, still remains the same. The result
of which is no less than this, that there can be no other gods or god
than such as was at first made or generated out of senseless matter and
may be corrupted again into it... here indeed lies the grand mystery of
Atheism. 66
If life and animation, as well soul and mind are effects of matter (which is traditionally
endowed with a negative or lesser ontological force than immaterial agents such as
64 Willis, Two discourses, 1.
65 Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London, 1642). For more detailed discussions on the various angles of
this problem see Guido Giglioni, ‘Anatomist Atheist? The ‘Hylozoistic’ Foundations of Francis Glisson’s
Anatomical Research’ in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, ed.
Grell and Cunningham (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996) pp115-135; Jonathon Sawday, The Body
Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995) see
especially Chapter 4 ‘Execution, Anatomy and Infamy’; John Henry, ‘Medicine and Pneumatology:
Henry More, Richard Baxter and Francis Glisson’s Treatise on the Energetic Nature of Substance’ in
Medical History 31 (1987), 15-40.
66 Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: wherein all the Reason and Philosophy
of Atheism is Confuted (1678). I have used the 1820 edition (Whitefish: Kessinger Reprints, 2010), 1:257-
8.
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