Renaissance medical thought was largely indebted to a Galenic tradition whose tendency had been to look at the soul only insofar as the effects of the body’s humors and spirits on its faculties could be established. This ultimately materialist tendency was nevertheless sometimes accompanied by a specific, and apparently incongruous, use of the immortal soul and its faculties in works by late Renaissance physicians. This paper looks at several such works relevant for the English context of the time – by Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius, whose Occulta naturae miracula (1559) was known in England in the late sixteenth century, as was his Sanctuarie of Salvation, translated in 1592; and two works on melancholy by English physicians: Timothie Bright’s Treatise of Melancholie (1586) and Thomas Walkington’s The Opticke Glasse of Humours (1607) – and asks: what exactly is the use they make of the immortal soul in a medical context? Is this a case of an uneasy conjunction of scientific-medical and theological-philosophical agendas? The suggestion I would like to make is that the theological-philosophical theme of the immortal soul is appropriated in these works in order to serve a medical purpose: understood as a source of activity in its own right, independent of the body, although necessarily using it as an instrument and also interacting with its activity in multifarious ways, the soul could be established as an object of medical care. Such care would be the province of an integrated medicine, of the body as well as of the soul and, ultimately, of the vital union of body and soul. The paper considers the conceptual ingredients of this view and their transmission, as well as the issues of disciplinary and institutional re-configuration it expressed. It is also aimed as a contribution to current discussions of the early modern ‘medicine of the mind’: the trend I am investigating here may be seen as occupying an intermediary conceptual and disciplinary space between the moral-religious care of the soul and the medical-determinist view – epitomized in the late Renaissance by Juan Huarte’s Examen de injenios (1575), known in England as The Examination of Wits (1594) – of the corporeal regimen of the mind.