Boerhaave was an enthusiast for Cartesian and Newtonian explanations of matter and motion early in his career and gave expression to mechanical, corpuscular theory in his explanation of how normal and abnormal physiology are determined by the flow of corpuscles of various sizes through vessels and fibers that constitute the solid parts of animal bodies.

For example, he is likely to have been taught a corpuscular theory of matter ultimately derived - via Julius Caesar Scaliger and influences from sixteenth-century Cambridge - from late medieval Aristotelian concepts of minima naturalia.