‘Instruments’ of the Body: The Conflicting Corporeal Hermeneutics of Francis Bacon’s Medical Art

This chapter examines a particular problem at the heart of Baconian science. It is often recognised that Francis Bacon’s scientific project falls into two distinct parts. The first was a characteristic openness to the accumulation of particulars. The second was an attachment to speculation and hypothesis. Despite this acknowledgement, scholars have found the precise relation between the two parts difficult to bridge. This chapter approaches this problem by turning to a particular example: Bacon’s prescriptions for medical reform. In his Latin polemic for the advancement of knowledge, the De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), in his extensive natural philosophical examination of the material processes of senescence, the Historia Vitae et Mortis (1623), and across a wide array of other disparate scientific texts, I suggest that the tension between theory and practice in Bacon translated to two radically different ways of approaching the medical body: one which viewed the careful refinement of the body’s health as its primary aim; and another which relentlessly pursued the prolongation of life. By showing how, and why, both perspectives arose, the chapter aims both to reveal the diverging impulses which underpinned Baconian science, and the kinds of tensions which existed within early natural philosophy in general.