ABSTRACT
“There is literally no part of life, that can be managed without help from medicine” wrote Desiderius Erasmus in the early sixteenth century (Erasmus, 1518). To him this meant an active policy by rulers to secure the physical well-being of citizens. Gyms, public baths, legal instructions for building homes, dredging of swamps, and control over food and drinks had all to be taken care of by the legislators in the interest of healthy, powerful and “proportionally developed” citizens. Almost at the same time Thomas More published his ideas of a modern health system. In his Utopia, well-equipped hospitals (“they may pass for little towns”), skilled physicians and dedicated nurses take care of the sick in such a way “so there is scarce one in a whole town that, if he should fall ill, would not choose rather to go thither than lie sick at home” (More, 1516). A century later, Francis Bacon, who is often regarded as a founding father of modern medicine, expressed his vision on how society should deal with illness and people who suffer from it (Bacon, 1626). The views of these three leading philosophers suggest a strong discontent with how things were organized in their own times, or, rather, with how they were not organized at all.
