Motion Without Progress
Bacon's complaint is not that physicians lack effort or reputation but that centuries of labour have produced repetition rather than advancement — 'much iteration, but small addition.' It is the same diagnosis he will later generalise to natural philosophy as a whole in Novum Organum: activity mistaken for method.
Medicine is a science which hath been (as we have said) more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced; the labour having been, in my judgment, rather in circle than in progression.
A List, Not a Lament
True to his method throughout the book, Bacon does not stop at diagnosis. He moves immediately into an itemised list of specific deficiencies — the discontinuance of Hippocrates's case-narratives, the neglect of comparative anatomy, the abandonment of incurable patients rather than the mitigation of their pain — each one a concrete research programme waiting for someone to take it up.
Drawn from Chapter IV of The Advancement of Learning (Book II, section X), on the knowledge that concerns the human body.
Related Concepts
