This article addresses the tension between conceptualizations of the objective body, which are central to biomedicine, and conceptualizations of the expressive body. Within a metaphysics which can be an adequate grounding for the practice of alternative medicine, I argue, the natural body must be fully conceptualized as both object and as expressive. I draw on phenomenology and on actor-network theory to outline a new model of `biosocial nature' which is inherently figurative and which is constructed by a network of human (...) and non-human actors. I then look at two remedies within the homeopathic materia medica, arguing that their capacity to treat ill health by acting as nodes with a network of `imagined connections' is more explicable within a biosocial than within a modernist metaphysics. (shrink)