THE SCENE: Sir Francis Bacon is a hugely influential figure in development of the scientific method. So it’s only appropriate that the story of his death shows off his dedication to scientific inquiry.
THE TEXT: Mr. Hobbes told me that the cause of his lordship’s [Francis Bacon] death was trying an experiment: viz., as he was taking the air in a coach with Dr. Witherborne (a Scotchman, physician to the king) towards Highgate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment presently.
They alighted out of the coach, and went into a woman woman’s house at the bottom of Highgate Hill, and bought a hen, and make the woman exenterate [disembowel] it, and then stuff the body with snow, and my lord did help to do it himself. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his lodgings (I supposed then at Gray’s Inn), but went to the earl of Arundel’s house at Highgate, where they put him into a good bed warmed with a pan; but it was a damp bed that had not been lain in in about a year before, which gave him such a cold that in two or three days he died of suffocation.
– Brief Lives, John Aubrey, 17th Century AD
