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

lood in 1628 and his reassertion, defence and development of his work twenty years
later was to completely destabilise the Galenic system of emanation from organic bodily
centres, showing that the nutritional faculty could not be based on the liver as organic
centre to the system of veins, venous blood and natural spirits. Nevertheless, a triple
order of faculty and spirit remained the basis of thought upon which the body was
imagined, observed and then reconceived throughout the seventeenth century.
The key notion in a vitalistic conception of the body (as we have seen in
Milton’s notion of the material soul) is that of spirit as substance, or a rarefied, active
degree of matter. The interplay between the various spirits and substances of the body
seem to be the very process of life in Glisson’s vision. The natural spirits of the body
receive the flow of vitalising vital spirits through the blood in a process which is a
struggle for and against assimilation, part conflict and part seduction. The natural spirits
do participate in their vitalisation, but they also struggle against it. In De Rachitude,
Glisson sketches a process which seems to give a bodily unconscious within the flow
and pulse of the blood, where the force of life, part aggressive, part sexual, works to
assimilate the matter and vegetative spirit of the body into its own higher, more vital
substance:
Inborn [natural/vegetative] spirits, like a bride, entice and at the same
time repulse the vital spirits, which in a sense play the role of the
bridegroom; on the other hand, the vital spirits, stimulated by their
heat and urged by the force of the pulses, assail the inborn spirits in a
way which is bolder and more daring than usual, and penetrate
stealthily into the inborn spirits’ territory. In the meantime, the inborn
spirits receive them not without a certain pleasure (although
discreetly, unwillingly, and reluctantly). Indeed, the bodily pleasure
itself is based on an amorous wrestling, and the most important part of
life itself lies in such a battle concerning the mutual union of both
spirits.” The vital constitution is the result of the struggle between the
two kinds of spirit, of their tendencies and counter-tendencies (nixus
and renixus). 90
The vital spirit of the blood (traditionally the arterial blood) is imagined as pulsing with
the forces of desire and conquest; unlike a modern conception of the body, the blood
does not feed, it seems rather to pillage or seduce the lower order of spirit. However the
desired result is the vitalisation of that natural spirit – in being assimilated it attains a
higher order of vitality.
90
Glisson quoted in Giglioni, ‘Genesis of Francis Glisson’s Philosophy of Life’, 76-77. Giglioni cites De
Rachitide, 107-110.
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