‘Proper Motions, Actions and Uses’: Physiological Knowledge as the Only Means to Rational Politics in Restoration England

This article is drawn from a doctoral thesis called ‘Governing Public Bodies: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Statecraft and Healthcare in England, 1650–1730’, which considers two things: how certain categories of person, certain subjectivities, have been assembled through government in the name of health; and how the health of the individual has been understood to relate to that of the collective. The particular writer focused on here is the physician and natural philosopher Walter Charleton (1620–1707). His publications are interesting because he presented his mechanical model of the human body as grounds for a practical project of interpreting what society was, and how it ought to have been organised. He coined the phrase ‘physico-theology’ in 1652 to describe his project of analysing ethical beliefs and moral motivations through studying the structure and functioning of human bodies. Researching his publications allows one to look in a new light at twenty-first-century understandings of the relationship between physiological expertise and arguments about certain individual behaviours being good or bad for collective society. Being thoroughly sensitive to the assumptions, aims, worries and associations of the seventeenth century serves as a distancing exercise, so that certain present healthcare-related objects and practices seem not quite so natural, desirable, obvious, stable and inevitable as one might take them to be. In other words, medical history can facilitate critical reflection upon the present. This article forms part of an investigation of the production and government of certain categories of person and notions of the collective through contemporary medical and political practices. The aim is to generate a critical analysis of the notion of ‘public health’ that breaks with the naturalised present through a study that brings together questions of the governance of the body and of the commonwealth. ‘Governance’ here denotes the influencing, shaping and steering of action and belief toward certain ends through a series of discontinuous and often opportunistic alliances of actors. Importantly, I do not assume either a docile individual upon which governmental practices were imposed or an active individual that reacted to and appropriated regulation. Rather, I understand the actors as products of governmental practices. This is to argue that