The Well-Ordered Body: Margaret Cavendish on Health and Disease

by Deborah Boyle

Though little-known now, Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was a prolific playwright, poet, essayist, fiction writer, and philosopher. Historians of philosophy have recently begun to study her five works of natural philosophy, in which she sets out a highly original theory of matter. Cavendish also devoted considerable space in these works to discussing health and disease, yet no scholarly attention has been paid to these parts of her theory. I try to remedy this lack by examining Cavendish's theory of disease. In particular, I look at the relationship between her views and the raging seventeenth-century debate between traditional Galenist physicians and the newfangled "iatrochemists," who interpreted sickness in chemical terms and believed in prescribing chemical remedies instead of (for example) blood-letting. While Cavendish was in many respects a Galenist, I show that she also reinterpreted Galenism in terms of her own theory of matter and an occasionalist theory of causation.