A Regimen of Health

Abstract

Bacon’s study of the natural sciences was directed toward the ‘use and benefit of mankind,’ because in Bacon’s humanism man’s importance went unquestioned. Bacon’s philosophy was in part a philosophy of action, and to act the Renaissance man had to be a whole man in every sense, fit, both physically and spiritually, for action. Consequently man’s health was important, though inadequately cared for. ‘Medicine hath been,’ said Bacon, ‘more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced; the labour having been, in my judgement, rather in a circle than in progression.’ For him, failure in medicine, as in the other divisions of learning, was a result of failure in method;

Physicians have not, partly out of their own practice, partly out of the constant probations reported in books, and partly out of the traditions of empirics, set down and delivered over certain experimental medicines for the cure of particular diseases, besides their own conjectural and magistral descriptions ... so in the matter we now handle, they be the best physicians, which being learned incline to the tradition of experience, or being empirics incline to the methods of learning.¹