The Health of the Body-Machine? or Seventeenth Century Mechanism and the Concept of Health

The concept of bodily health is problematic for mechanists like Descartes, as it seems that they need to appeal to something extrinsic to a machine, i.e., its purpose, to determine whether the machine is working well or badly, and so healthy or unhealthy. I take issue with this claim. By drawing on the history of medicine, I suggest that in the seventeenth century there was space for a non-teleological account of health. I further argue that mechanists can and did appeal to structural integrity, as a non-teleological notion of form, to ground the norms required for ascriptions of health.