ABSTRACT
Fuelling early modern inquiry into the body and its properties was a mandate that can be encapsulated in one popular injunction: Nosce teipsum – know thyself. Medical manuals, anatomical drawings and even popular poetry commanded men and women of all ages and stations to know and understand their own living and functioning (or, for most people, malfunctioning) humoural body.1 One’s own body provided a perfect subject of study: readily accessible, sensate and vitally able to illuminate bodily processes. Francis Bacon, in his essay on health, explained how the study of one’s own body, and the knowledge that such study engendered, were crucial to establishing and maintaining good health. ‘There is a wisdom in this [study of the body] beyond the rules of physic:’ Bacon wrote, ‘a man’s own observation, what he finds good of, and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.’ Though modern medicine prizes the physician’s objectivity and impartiality when making judgements about a patient, Bacon and many of his contemporaries valued highly the patient’s subjectivity – his or her embodied knowledge of the body and self – in matters of health. ‘Examine thy customs of diet, sleep, exercise, apparel, and the like’, Bacon encouraged, and reminded his readers not to ignore the most expert person with regards to their body – themselves: ‘forget not to call … the best acquainted with your body, as the best reputed of for his faculty.’2
