Dispassionate Dissections and Their Emotional Rewards: Reading William Harvey and Richard Blackmore

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay argues that the deep, almost rapturous piousness that the physician William Harvey and the poet Richard Blackmore exhibit in their works is built upon their conviction that the fluids that spurt from bodies in pain do so in accordance with nature's orderly rhythms. The wonder that Harvey and Blackmore feel at the beauty of a divinely ordered world, that is, cannot exist without their adoption of an indifferent attitude towards injury and death. By attending to the emotions that indifference enables or magnifies, I interpret indifference as an affective stance that prepares one to experience other forms of feeling instead of a standalone and all-encompassing state of being.