Meanwhile, I ask for a lenient judgement of all uncorrected faults: awkward constructions, redundant words, repetitions of the same thing—though Seneca supports me: “What is never said enough is never said too often”—confusions of tense and number, printers’ errors, and so on. My translations are sometimes paraphrases rather than exact renderings: “not word for word.” As an author, I take greater freedom, and select only what serves my purpose.

Quotations are often inserted into the text, making the style less smooth, or into the margin, as it happened. I have quoted Greek authors—Plato, Plutarch, Athenaeus, and others—through their translators, because the originals were less readily available. I have mixed “sacred things with secular,” but I hope without profaning them. When naming authors I have placed them “as chance suggested,” not in chronological order: sometimes modern writers before ancient ones, as they came to mind. In this sixth edition some things have been altered or removed, others corrected, and much added, because many good authors on all kinds of subjects have since come into my hands. This is no discredit, no impropriety or oversight.

Nothing in life was ever so carefully worked out that events, age, and experience did not always bring something new, teach some lesson—so that you do not know what you think you know, and reject in practice what you considered best. Nothing was ever planned so well at first that use, age, or something would not change it, advise you better, and, on reconsideration, make you unsay your words and reject what you accepted. But I am now resolved never to publish this treatise again: “Nothing to excess.” I will make no further additions, changes, or retractions. I have finished.

The last and greatest objection is that I, a clergyman, have meddled with medicine: Have you so much leisure from your own affairs that you attend to other people’s, which do not concern you at all? That was Menedemus’s objection to Chremes. Have I so much leisure, or so little business of my own, that I must look after other people’s affairs, which do not concern me? What have I to do with medicine? “Let physicians undertake what belongs to physicians.”

The Spartans were once taking counsel on affairs of state when a dissolute fellow spoke extremely well and to the point. His speech met with general approval. A venerable senator stepped forward and insisted that it be rejected, good though it was, because “it was disgraced by its thoroughly bad author”: it had no better source. Let some good man repeat it, and then it could pass. They accepted this advice: “it was done,” and the proposal was immediately entered in the record. “And so the good opinion remained; the bad author was replaced.”

You say the same of me, irritable as you are. Perhaps you admit that what I have written on medicine would be acceptable if someone else had done it—a professional physician, say—but why should I meddle with this subject? Hear me out. I readily admit that many other subjects in both secular learning and theology deserve treatment. If I had written merely “for display,” to show myself off, I would have preferred one of those. Being more familiar with them, I could more gladly have indulged myself and better satisfied myself and others;

except that at this time fate drove me onto this rock of melancholy and swept me away down this side stream—a little rivulet diverted from the main channel of my studies. In my spare hours I have occupied and amused myself with it as a most necessary and useful subject. I do not prefer it to theology, which I acknowledge as the queen of professions, with all the others as her handmaids. Rather, I saw no equally pressing need in theology. If I had written a straightforward exposition of doctrine, there are already so many books of that kind—so many commentators, treatises, pamphlets, expositions, and sermons—that whole teams of oxen could not haul them.

And if I had been as eager and ambitious as some others, I might perhaps have printed a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, a sermon at St Mary’s, Oxford, a sermon at Christ Church, or a sermon before the Right Honourable, the Right Reverend, a sermon before the Right Worshipful; a sermon in Latin, in English, a sermon with a name, a sermon without; a sermon, a sermon, and so on. But I have always been as eager to keep my work of this kind unpublished as others have been to put theirs through the press and publish it.

To write religious controversy would have been like cutting off one of the Hydra’s heads: “one dispute breeds another.” One produces the next, with so many replies, further replies, and swarms of questions, “in this sacred war fought with the point of the pen,” that once I had begun I could never finish. As Pope Alexander VI observed long ago, one would be much better off provoking a great prince than a begging friar—or, I would add, a Jesuit or a seminary priest. “This breed of men is unconquerable.” They are a body that cannot be refuted; they must and will have the last word;

and they conduct their disputes with such vehemence, insolence, abominable lying, falsification, and bitterness that, as the poet said, “Is it blind fury, or does some fiercer force drive you, or guilt? Answer me.” Whether blind fury, error, rashness, or something else spurs them on, I do not know. What I do know is that, as Augustine observed long ago, “the storm of contention clouds the clear sky of charity.” This tempest of dispute overcasts charity’s serenity. In every branch of learning, too many spirits of this kind have already been conjured up—more than we know how to lay to rest—and they rage so furiously and make such a racket,

that, as Quintilian said, it would have been far better for some of them to have been born unable to speak and wholly uneducated than to fall into such folly and destroy themselves. Better to have left unwritten: for silence will always be safe. It is a general fault. So Severinus the Dane complains of medicine: unhappy creatures that we are, we spend our days on useless questions and disputes, intricate subtleties, “about goat’s wool”—about moonlight reflected in water—while leaving nature’s greatest treasures untouched, where the best remedies for every kind of disease may be found. We not only neglect them ourselves, but obstruct, condemn, forbid, and ridicule others willing to investigate them. These considerations have now induced me to choose this medical subject.