ABSTRACT
As a devout Royalist and high churchman, Walter Charleton fled Oxford for London in 1649 and opened a fashionable medical practice in Russell Street, Covent Garden. During the Interregnum he spent some time in the Netherlands and Paris where he met with the king in exile and became part of the Newcastle Circle of Sir Kenelm Digby, Thomas Hobbes, George Ent and Margaret Cavendish. In a world turned upside down where external control appeared impossible, many turned inwards to contemplate how to control their bodies and minds. Walter Charleton wrote and published about his struggles to achieve such control. He offered advice and mapped out a strategy. Charleton's works were widely read by famous men such as Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and John Locke, but they also appealed to a wider community interested in medicine, philosophy and theology during a terrible era of political and spiritual turmoil.
