186 ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 



depend, are trifling, and because medicine, not founded on 

 philosophy, is a weak thing. Therefore, as too extensive 

 generals, though true, do not bring men home to action, 

 there is more danger in such generals as are false in them 

 selves and seduce instead of directing the mind. Medicine, 

 therefore, has been rather professed than labored, and yet 

 more labored than advanced, as the pains bestowed thereon 

 were rather circular than progressive; for I find great repe 

 tition, and but little new matter, in the writers of physic. 



We divide medicine into three parts, or offices: viz., 1st 

 the preservation of health; 2d, the cure of diseases; and 3d, 

 the prolongation of life. For this last part, physicians seem 

 to think it no capital part of medicine, but confound it with 

 the other two; as supposing, that if diseases be prevented, 

 or cured after invasion, long life must follow of course. 

 But, then, they do not consider that both preservation and 

 cure regard only diseases, and such prolongation of life as 

 is intercepted by them: whence the means of spinning out 

 the full thread of life, or preventing, for a season, that kind 

 of death which gradually steals upon the body by simple 

 resolution, and the wasting of age, is a subject that no 

 physician has treated suitably to its merit. Let none im 

 agine we are here repealing the decrees of fate and Provi 

 dence, by establishing a new office of medicine; for, doubt 

 less, Providence alike dispenses all kinds of deaths, whether 

 they proceed from violence, diseases, or the course and period 

 of age; yet without excluding the use of remedies and pre 

 ventions, for art and industry do not here overrule, but ad 

 minister to nature and fate. 



Many have unskilfully written upon the preservation of 

 health, particularly by attributing too much to the choice, 

 and too little to the quantity of meats. As to quantity, 

 they, like the moral philosophers, highly commend moder 

 ation; whereas, both fasting changed to custom, and full 

 feeding, where a man is used to it, are better preservatives 

 of health than those mediocrities they recommend, which 

 commonly dispirit nature, and unfit her to bear excess, or 



