By urging a particular organic account of inwardness and individuality, Galenic medical theory gave poets a language of inner emotion… composed of the very stuff of being. The texts we will be examining Shakespeare's sonnets emerge from a historical moment when the "scientific" language of analysis had not yet been separated from the sensory language of experience… the Galenic regime of the humoral self that supplies these writers with much of their vocabulary of inwardness demanded invasion of social and psychological realms by biological and environmental processes.