Republican Bodies: Examining the Medical and Political Writings of Marchamont Nedham in 17th-Century England

This paper explores a highly under-studied form of medical thinking about political bodies, and particularly, the relationship between the medical theories and political thinking of the classical republican theorist, Marchamont Nedham. European writers of the early modern period were extraordinarily deft in drawing analogies and establishing connections between natural bodies and political bodies, including analogies of social harmonies and social illnesses requiring medico-political remedies. As a physician and medical writer and also a prolific political pamphleteer and journalist, Nedham challenged Galenic medicine and supported the founding of a Society of Chemical Physicians after advocating for a reconceptualization of republican citizenship on a populist model. Rather than focusing on analogies of bodies, Nedham understood and described natural bodies as literally intertwined with other natural bodies within a community, and the moral behavior of citizens infecting or preserving the health of all bodies and the body politic. This paper discusses Nedham’s commentaries on the importance of strong bodies for strong republics, drawing especially upon his republican editorials in the Revolutionary 1650s and his controversial Medela Medicinae (1665). Unlike more familiar explorations of natural philosophy in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington in these decades, which relied upon radical theories of automation and mechanization, Nedham’s medical thought as a Helmontian maintained an idea of bodies as cooperative, potentially harmonious, and enlivened with vital spirits – a wholly different basis for conceptualizing actual political bodies. Nedham’s commentary on warfare, sex, breastfeeding, medicine, and citizenship show how Nedham championed the reason and courage of male citizens as essential for republican grandezza, and condemned both bodies and bodies politic that he saw as corrupted by disease.