ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century English had two main approaches to illness, called religious and secular. A subsidiary approach to illness, the magical approach, related to both secular and religious orientations. Virtually everyone in seventeenth-century England had a humoral view of the human body, health and illness. Secular and religious approaches to illness existed side by side. It was rare, if not unheard of, for any individual to be characterised by one approach to the exclusion of the other. Distinctions made between 'religious' and 'superstitious' approaches to illness are invidious. Robert Burton wrote that the general causes of illness were either supernatural or natural. Supernatural are from God and his angels, or, by God's permission, from the devil and his ministers. Popular humoralism dovetailed nicely with popular astrology, which helped to explain variations in health and illness phenomena from person to person and time to time.
