Here we can see the literal sense in which “common wealth” was often understood, as the wealth of the English nation. But this is not “wealth” as conceived by the mercantilists, derived from foreign trade. Starkey instead regards England’s most “prosperous state” as a function of its internal economic operations—including labor, a category notably absent from mercantilist writing—for which the language of humoralism provides an appropriate vocabulary. Likewise, Galenic language suggested itself to the bullionists as a figurative resource for representing the intrinsic composition of the nation’s alloy coins. Hence, Thomas Milles argues, “Money in a Kingdome, [is] the same that Blood is in the Body, and all Allayes but humors.”42
The humoral model does not cut the body off from the world. If anything, it stresses the impossibility of separating the body from the external elements on which it depends—air, food, drink, even astrological influences. Crucial to its understanding of physiology are notions of input and output. As Thomas Laqueur has argued, “seminal emission, bleeding, purging, and sweating were all forms of evacuation that served to maintain the free-trade economy of fluids at a proper level.”43 For that reason, a humoral vocabulary is also evident in much early modern economic writing about the English body politic’s commercial transactions with other nations. The all-important mercantilist notion of the balance of trade, even as it draws on the new model of Italian double-entry bookkeeping, resonates with humoralism’s characteristic vocabulary of equipoise and homeostasis. So too does the recurrent mercantilist term “vent”; a synonym for the sale of domestic commodities abroad, it echoes the Galenic conviction that superfluous humors such as choler needed to be “vented” or expelled to restore complexional order within the body. As Margaret Healy has noted in her important study of Renaissance fictions of disease, mercantilists frequently employed a humoral conception of the “glutted, unvented” body politic; “wee must finde meanes by Trade,” Mun observes, “to vent our superfluities.”44
Nevertheless, to the extent that humoral pathology emphasized dysfunctions within the body’s internal systems, its concepts and vocabularies were in many ways more useful for the residual discourse of “commonwealth”—that is, for the notion of the body politic as a primarily self-sufficient entity. It is perhaps telling that Gerard Malynes, nostalgically reflecting on the difference between the new, globally connected nation-state and the self-nourishing “commonwealth” of old, should resort to a metaphor from Galenic medicine to represent the political economy of the latter: “from the Prince as from a liuely fountain all vertues did descend into the bosome of that commonwealth, his worthy counsellors were with the magistrates as ornaments of the Law, and did ministrate (like Phisitions to the weale publicke) good potions for the ridding out of all distemperate humors.”45 Notably, this fantasy longs not for Laqueur’s “free-trade economy” but for an isolationist program of ethical if not ethnic cleansing.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Galenic emphasis on the body’s internal humoral balance was gradually if only very partially displaced by a new medical understanding of the body’s vulnerability to invasion and infection by external foreign bodies. Regular outbreaks of epidemic illnesses such as plague, the sweating sickness, and, in particular, syphilis revealed the inadequacy of the conventional, Galenic understanding of disease as an endogenous state. Although providential and miasmic etiologies of epidemic disease retained popularity into the eighteenth century, physicians increasingly began to propose that illness was a determinate thing transmitted from body to body. This new exogenous model of disease, which I have examined elsewhere, was formally outlined in the first decades of the sixteenth century by the Veronese physician Girolamo Fracastoro and the iconoclastic Swiss physician Paracelsus.46 Neither Fracastoro nor Paracelsus dispensed entirely with the theory of the humors; but in attempting to explain the transmission of epidemic illness, both radically reconfigured the very notion of disease itself. For Fracastoro and Paracelsus alike, disease was less an internal state of complexional imbalance than a determinate semina or seed, an external entity that invaded the body through its pores and orifices.
The idea was hardly an innovation of medical experts. Exogenous models of disease were part of folk medical lore, and religious rhetoric customarily embodied sin as a pathogenic spiritus mali that invaded the body through its sensory apertures.47 But the notion of disease as an invasive entity was picked up with particular vigor in the century after Fracastoro and Paracelsus. Girolamo Cardano proposed in 1557 that the seeds of disease were infinitesimally small animals capable of reproduction.48 With the growing Protestant reaction against classical Galenism and the championing of new “reformist” pharmacies, Paracelsus’s model of pathenogenesis was refined and disseminated by many physicians, including the Belgian J. B. Van Helmont. This is not to say that there was any radical break with Galenism. Many writers, such as the English physician Robert Fludd, cheerfully accommodated the new Paracelsan model within the old humoral paradigm.49 But other intellectual developments helped consolidate the new exogenous models of disease. The renewed seventeenth-century interest in the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius and his doctrine of atomism helped writers like Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish to reimagine disease as an irreducibly small, migratory entity.50 And the invention of the microscope, which prompted Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of minuscule parasites, potentially pushed reformist European medical science even farther in the direction of a pathological microbiologism. Even non-Protestants embraced the new models of disease: the Jesuit Athanasius Kirchner claimed to have observed a microscopically small organism that caused plague. The discovery of the bacillus that was the agent of bubonic plague, however, had to wait another two hundred years.51
To understand the emergence of these new exogenous etiologies simply in the idealist terms of philosophical and scientific discoveries, however, is to conceal much. In particular, it neglects the seemingly unrelated yet immensely formative political horizons within which the pathological objects of these new “discoveries” were first conceived. In the sixteenth century, the names of dangerous diseases increasingly become nationalized in order to denote their putative point of origin. Typhus fever, for example, was often called the morbus Hungaricus, and dysentery became known as the “Irish disease.” England was not spared pathologization: the epidemic disease that attacked northern Europe in the 1520s was widely called the “English sweat,” and rickets became known in the seventeenth century as the “English disease.”52 Such nationalized nomenclature was most evident, however, in the case of syphilis:
the Muscovites referred to it as the Polish sickness, the Poles as the German sickness, and the Germans as the French sickness—a term of which the English also approved (French pox) as did the Italians.… The Flemish and Dutch called it “the Spanish sickness,” as did the inhabitants of North-West Africa. The Portuguese called it “the Castillian sickness,” whilst the Japanese and the people of the East Indies came to call it “the Portuguese sickness.”53
As this account hints, the global spread of syphilis prompted radically new etiologies of the disease. It had begun to be seen as not only a state of humoral disarray but also a thing that migrated across national borders. The above passage shows also how the perception of syphilis’s migrations had an unmistakably economic tinge: the movement of the disease from Spain to Holland and North Africa, and from Portugal to the East Indies and Japan, delineated new, international trade routes. Communicable disease, in other words, was increasingly seen as an exotic if dangerous commodity, shipped into the nation by merchants, soldiers, and other alien migrants. Infection of the body politic by foreign bodies thus provided a template for infection of bodies natural.
The discourse of syphilis was not the only occasion for the pathologization of the foreign in late Tudor and early Stuart political writing. Moralist writers fired numerous jeremiads at exotic commodities, which they repeatedly lambasted as the agents of moral and economic illness alike.54 With the help of some euphuistic alliteration, John Deacon wrote