Procedimiento de medición

When Bacon came to revise 1605 text of The Advancement of Learning for its Latin version,

he made substantial alterations to the chapter dealing with medicine.1 The most obvious change is the

division of the science into three branches. The text of 1605 does not divide medicine at all, defining it simply as ―the art of the cure.‖ For Bacon at that time, medicine amounted to therapy, or the alleviation of disease. His restriction runs athwart the medieval paradigm stemming from Galen,

who, in De Sanitate Tuenda, splits practical medicine into two branches, hygiene, or the prevention of

disease, and therapeutics, or its remedy, a scheme reinforced by Avicenna‘s Canon, the most

influential medical textbook of the Middle Ages.2 Although at points Bacon‘s 1605 text implies that

medicine includes the preservation of health, explicitly it limits the subject to the remedy of disease.3

When revising the text in 1623, however, Bacon does not adhere to the traditional program either. Sometimes, other medical writers of his day, aligning their compasses to Galen rather than to Avicenna, would divide practical medicine into three parts rather than two, a plan countenanced by

1

In the 1605 text, this is Chapter 10 of Book Two; in the 1623 text, it is Chapter Two of Book Four. For the text of The Advancement of Learning (1605) I have used the edition by G.W. Kitchin (reprinted, Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2001). The text of De Augmentis is found in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longmans, 1857-74), hereafter abbreviated SEH. In the parenthetical citations of SEH, the first number refers to the Latin text, the second to the English translation.

2

There was no immutable consensus about the branches of medicine among classical, medieval, and Renaissance medical texts. Generally, however, it was thought to consist of five parts, three theoretical (semeiology, physiology, and pathology) and two practical (hygiene and therapy). It is the practical side of medicine that is my concern here, for that was also Bacon‘s concern. Whether in the 1605 Advancement or in the 1623 De Augmentis, Bacon uses only practical categories; semeiology, physiology, and pathology do not warrant separate divisions. For a discussion of the shifting divisions of medicine, see Heikki Mikkeli, Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1999), 32-40.

3

In the 1605 Advancement, Bacon may be following either the Hippocratic author of Peri Techne, who appoints to medicine only the removal of distress and disease, or the Roman physician Celsus, who writes that medicine started as an art of curing disease and only later adopted hygienic measures, a passage to which Bacon refers elsewhere.

Galen‘s To Thrasyboulos; for instance, the Welsh physician John Jones in his A Briefe, Excellent, and Profitable Discourse (1574) separates the offices of medicine under the Greek headings

Prophilacticke, Euecticke, and Analepticke.4 In De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, however, while Bacon divides medicine three ways, fitting most passages from the 1605 edition under the first two branches, ―preservation of health‖ and ―cure of diseases,‖ he offers as the third branch of medicine something usually taken to be either the purpose or side-effect of preserving and restoring health, the prolongation of life. It is when appraising the status of this third branch that Bacon adds

most of his new material. The several new paragraphs largely adumbrate passages in The History of

Life and Death, a work also published in 1623 and devoted to the prolongation of life. This third branch, which Bacon neither mentions nor implies in 1605, is now medicine‘s ―principal part.‖ Bacon makes a more astounding claim when he says that no one else before him has noticed its importance to medicine. As he declares, ―I am the first to bring [the prolongation of life] within the office and function of art‖ (SEH I.591, IV.383).

This last remark by Bacon should discomfit anyone who has read a health manual from the period. Ostensibly, Bacon was not the first to situate the prolongation of life within the office and

function of medicine. Take as examples two writers whom Bacon cites in The History of Life and

Death, Marsilio Ficino and Luigi Cornaro. Ficino‘s Three Books on Life (1489) has the expressed

intent of prolonging the lives of scholars, poets, and philosophers. In La Vita Sobria (1559), Cornaro

repeatedly assures readers that they can lengthen their lives if they restrict their diet and follow other temperate habits. Bacon surely knew about those claims and perhaps, too, about the array of other medical writers whom he does not mention but who also spoke candidly about prolonging life. For

instance, the French physician Laurent Joubert poses as the second question of his Popular Errors

4

John Jones, A Briefe, Excellent, and profitable Discourse, of the naturall beginning of all growing and living things, heate, generation, effects of the spirits, government, use and abuse of Phisicke, preservation, etc. (London, 1574), Gi r. Although Jones cites To Thrasyboulos here, he does not use the exact same terms as Galen. In To Thrasyboulos, Galen divides medicine into two parts, preservation [phylaxis] and healing [therapeia], but countenances the possibility of a third, prevention [prophylaxis]. See Selected Works, trans. P.N. Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 80-83.

(1578), ―Whether it is possible to prolong man‘s life through medicine.‖ He argues that it is. So did physicians and hygienists such as Jones, Thomas Moffett, Levinus Lemnius, William Vaughan, and Leonardus Lessius. As discussed in my introduction, early modern medical writers frequently raised the question whether it was possible to prolong life. Although many thought that it was not possible, many others asserted that it was—in fact, that increased longevity was one of the principal benefits of medicine. John Jones cites Hippocrates, Galen, and Celsus as proving that physic ―conserveth health,

mendeth the decayed, and prolongeth life.‖5

Indeed, if one takes the term prophylaxis to mean the prolongation of life, as historian Guido Giglioni has, the tripartite taxonomy by Jones, which I gave

earlier, includes the same three branches used by Bacon in De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum

(1623): preservation of health, remedy of disease, and the prolongation of life.6

Why would Bacon claim to be the first to subsume the prolongation of life under art when, for years, physicians and hygienists had been claiming that office for medicine? The answer seems to be that, in a fashion commensurate with his avowal to call new ideas by old names, he does not mean quite the same thing by ―the prolongation of life‖ that many of his contemporaries and predecessors did. In 1623, Bacon announces that physicians have confounded the prolongation of life with the other two branches of medicine, the preservation of health and the cure of disease. The confusion has resulted for a simple reason:

[Physicians] imagine that if diseases be repelled before they attack the body, and cured after they have attacked it, prolongation of life necessarily follows. But though there is no doubt of this, yet they have not penetration to see that these two offices pertain only to diseases, and such prolongation of life as is intercepted and cut short by them. (SEH I.590, IV.383)

Bacon here is attacking an opinion then prevailing among physicians that medicine serves to prolong

life by preventing and curing diseases that otherwise might foreshorten it. Moffett‘s Healths

5

Jones, Discourse, G iv. 6

See Guido Giglioni, ―The Hidden Life of Matter: Techniques for Prolonging Life in the Writings of Francis Bacon‖ in Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought, ed. Julie Robin Solomon and Catherine Gimelli Martin (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 134. I do not endorse Giglioni‘s interpretation of ―prophylaxis.‖

Improvement, which was written and circulated probably as early as the 1580s even though not printed till 1655, aptly abbreviates the received wisdom:

But some men will further object against me, What sir? May diet prolong a man‘s life? Why then through diet we may prove immortal, or at least live as long as Adam did. Whereunto I answer, that albeit immortality is denied upon the earth to mortal men, yet so much life is

prolonged by good diet, by how much diseases are thereby eschewed.7

Moffett‘s imaginary debate evinces a conceptual problem posed by the corrective effect of human art upon human life, a problem as much active then as now. The prolongation of life can refer either to time added against the natural processes of age and decay, as Moffett‘s fictional interlocutor would have it, or to the time saved from illnesses that would foreshorten life, as Moffett himself proclaims.

Bacon clearly conceives of the prolongation of life in the first way. He seeks to add length to human life, not just to postpone death by disease. His argument is that traditionally physicians have not differentiated prolongation against the interception of disease (or by diseases ―eschewed,‖ in Moffett‘s words) from prolongation against the interception of senescence and natural death. Thus he

proposes to include under the topic of medicine ―the lengthening of the thread of life itself [filum

ipsum vitae producere], and the postponement for a time of that death which gradually steals on by natural dissolution and the decay of age‖ (SEH I.590-1, IV.383).

In today‘s parlance, Bacon was a ―prolongevist.‖8

He sought less the increase of life

expectancy than an increase of lifespan, that is, the lengthening of the thread of life itself. For Bacon, this amounts to attempting to eschew and cure ―natural dissolution,‖ the decay brought on by age. Old age is to be treated like a disease, an object of prophylaxis and therapeutics. By those means, the

human lifespan can be stretched to Old Testament proportions. In The History of Life and Death

7 _{Thomas Moffett, Healthes Improvement (London, 1655), 4.} 8

(1623), Bacon sets as benchmarks the lives of superlongevous patriarchs like Methuselah, who lived

969 years.9

Using an uncommon definition for the prolongation of life, Bacon‘s boast to introduce it into medicine would appear to mean that he is the first to propose that medicine has the duty to extend human life far beyond its supposedly natural bounds, not just beyond the bounds accidentally

collapsed upon it by diseases. In fact, scholars have tended to interpret his dissent from the dominant view in just that way. Most recently, Guido Giglioni has observed that Bacon breaks from classical tradition when he ―dismisses as a form of theoretical and practical idleness the ancients‘ belief in the

existence of insurmountable limits in extending the length of human life.‖10

Such a reading poses a problem, however. It assumes that Bacon counterpoised himself strictly against the Galenic tradition of medicine. True, that tradition predominated in early modern Europe, and, like Galen, early modern physicians most often apologized for aging as a necessity of nature to which one must accord as best one can. Thus, Bacon‘s opinion that senescence was tractable militated against the dominant view that every human body must decline in roughly the same way and at roughly the same pace. Nevertheless, the effort to prevent and remedy old age was not new with Bacon. As seen in the previous chapter, alchemists, natural magicians, Paracelsians, and any number of physicians inspired by their ideas thought that senescence could be halted or reversed with the use of an elixir, an astral sympathy, or a quintessence. What is more, Bacon

includes such thinkers within the profession of medicine. In De Augmentis as well as in The History

of Life and Death, he engages chemical and magical physic although, with regard to the prolongation of life, he balks at the lofty promises and wayward remedies of both and cautions readers to beware magical potions and ―precious‖ medicines (OFB XII.240-1). He alludes to Paracelsians and other

9

For the text of The History of Life and Death, I have used The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. XII, ed. Graham Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). The series is hereafter abbreviated OFB.

10

Giglioni, 141. Giglioni goes on to argue that Bacon‘s ―unlimited prospects‖ for art‘s conquest of aging necessitated a ―drastic redefinition of the meaning of the natural order of life.‖ I address Giglioni‘s analysis again in the final chapter of this section.

alchemists when he questions the efficacy of supposedly life-giving properties of metallic cordials

like potable gold and the spirits of salt (OFB XII.232-7).11 The blood baths that he finds morally

repugnant infiltrate the works of Ficino, whom he cites, and Roger Bacon, whom he does not (OFB XII.320-1). All such treatments aim at delaying or reversing senescence and thereby advancing human lives beyond the limits attainable by Galenic hygiene and a regimen of simples. Bacon‘s ranking them as medicine may offend modern sensibilities adjusted to the sharp contrast between valid science and superstitious magic; however, his positioning reflects the conditions of the sciences of his time better than our own does. Not only Ficino, but other physicians carrying the imprimaturs of medical colleges, such as Girolamo Cardano, Andrew Boorde, and John Securis, testified to the value of what we no doubt would consider magical remedies. Furthermore, at least two early modern medical writers who represented Galenic physic but doubted the use of elixirs and astrological figures

nevertheless approved medicine‘s ability to increase the lifespan. In Popular Errors, Joubert argues

that by deeply moistening spermatic parts medicine can not only preserve life but prolong it. Cornaro, whose restrictive diet differs from Galenic hygiene more in degree than in kind, repeatedly assures his readers that if someone of his own frail constitution can reach eighty, ninety, or one hundred years of age by use of his severe diet, people of even average constitutions can live even longer by it.

In the light of this evidence, we should not readily consent that Bacon was the first to fit radical life extension into the art of medicine. Secondly, given Bacon‘s own references to the efforts of alchemists, Ficino, Paracelsus, and Cornaro before him, he also must have known that he was not. Thus, his remark that nevertheless he was merits greater consideration. Why would Bacon claim to be the first to place the prolongation of life under the art of medicine when he knew that predecessors had thought to use medicine to extend the lifespan?

11 _{Both Ellis and Rees note that Bacon‘s likely source for this passage is the Antidotarium (Basle, 1588) by Johannes} Wecker, a Swiss physician and alchemist.

The answer appears to have something to do with the word ―art.‖ Just as Bacon affixes a

novel meaning to the prolongation of life, he also restricts the meaning of ―art.‖ In The Advancement

of Learning and De Augmentis, each art discussed has a distinct object of study. Bacon classifies each by cleaving knowledge where the objects of knowledge themselves cleave. For instance, the whole of human learning first splits according to the faculties of human understanding—memory, imagination, and reason—revealing three respective subjects, history, poesy, and philosophy (II.i.1). A different branch of learning indicates a different object or end. Medicine constitutes one of several arts directed toward the good of the human body but is distinguished from the rest by the kind of good it seeks, the good of health as opposed to the goods of beauty, strength, and pleasure. Within

medicine (according to De Augmentis, not to The Advancement), one office pertains to the

preservation of health against sickness and another to the restoration of health after sickness. The third, the prolongation of life, pertains to natural dissolution, a term Bacon substitutes for ―age,‖ the vagueness of which solicits a warning from him elsewhere (OFB XII.164-5).

Bacon‘s declaration to be the first ―to bring the prolongation of life within the function and office of art‖ suggests that he is the first to propose that senescence itself is not understood. In the

original Latin, Bacon writes, ―…in artis officium et munus jam primum a nobis revocaretur.‖ Ellis‘s

translation loses the sense of revocaretur. Bacon purports to call the prolongation of life back to

medicine. In the light of his glosses ―Prometheus‖ and ―Orpheus‖ in De Sapientia Veterum (1609),

the verb suggests that he is restoring to medicine a task that its most ancient form recognized but that it has since lost. According to Bacon, the branch of medicine directed toward the prolongation of life must seek to understand what natural dissolution is, which in his practical mode of investigation amounts to understanding how it works. Knowledge of senescence will improve with practical accomplishments that ameliorate senescence. First, however, medicine must recognize that

senescence is a phenomenon separate from disease and health. As such, it warrants its own discipline of study. The lack of a definite article in Latin makes possible two different renderings of the noun

encourages both readings at once. The prolongation of life is to be an art fitted within the art of medicine. As an art, its success can be measured by trial and experiment. Once capable of growth, it may assume a place within the art of medicine, which it will renew and fulfill.

At least part of Bacon‘s declaration to be the first to fit the prolongation of life under the medical art is justified. Justified is his indirect claim that those before him did not treat senescence as an object of discovery and that he, by turn, does. Harder to justify is his claim that the inclusion of the prolongation of life will transform the art of medicine. This second claim is harder to justify, because, for the next two centuries, medicine paid little heed to the buccinator‘s reveille; instead, it progressed as an art while continuing to envision the prolongation of life as conquest of emergent disease. My focus for the next few chapters is, therefore, Bacon‘s treatment of senescence as an object of discovery. What justifies his claim to inaugurate this aspect of the medical is, in part, the theoretical basis that prolongevists—alchemists, natural magicians, and the iatrochemist Paracelsus— who preceded him shared with Galenic apologists, who tended to deny the possibility and goodness of subverting natural decay. The prolongevists preceding Bacon based their effort on principles derived from Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian texts of natural philosophy. Those principles lead them to believe that, however hard they struggled to find the best means by which to counteract