Reading initially seems like the most disembodied of processes. It requires a minimum of physical activity. The eyes move imperceptibly over the page, the hands turn pages; the body occasionally stretches and fidgets, but only to avoid the aches of inactivity. In the framework of early modern ethical physiology, however, reading entailed a profound intensification of the perpetual agon between disease and health, between passion and reason. A highly risky activity, reading imports into the self forces that may either improve or contaminate it. It can stir the emotions to virtue or to vice, but even the excitation to virtue is hazardous, since the emotional medium of such excitation is an inherently unruly and unhealthy arena, preternaturally subverting the precarious rule of reason. In this essay I want to think about what was imagined to happen in the embodied self of the reader. I also want to ask why the quiet hazards of reading were so frequently likened to the metabolic processes of digestion.