MEMBER 4. SUBSECTION 1. Physician, patient, medicine.

Of the various gifts that our apostle Paul says God has bestowed on human beings, medicine is far from the least: it is most necessary and particularly beneficial to humanity.

After God, therefore, in all our desperate circumstances—for “healing comes from the Most High,” Ecclesiasticus 38:2—we must turn to and rely on the physician, who is “the hand of God,” says Hierophilus. God has given him knowledge so that God may be glorified in his wonderful works. “With such things he heals people and takes away their pain,” Ecclesiasticus 38:6–7. When you need the physician, do not let him leave you. “The time may come when their efforts succeed,” verse 13.

There can therefore be no doubt that, if we seek a physician as we should, we may find relief from our illnesses. I mean one who is competent and deserves the name. There are mountebanks, quacks and untrained practitioners in almost every street and every village who assume this title. These base and uneducated tradesmen cause this noble and useful art to be slandered and despised. But I am speaking of a physician who is reputable, learned, skilful and honest, whose duties are discussed at length by Wecker in his Antidotary, chapter 2, and Medical Compendium; Crato; Julius Alexandrinus in his medical work; Heurnius in Medical Practice, book 3, chapter 1; and others.

For this particular disease, Paracelsus insists that anyone who undertakes to cure it must be a magician, a chemist, a philosopher and an astrologer. Thurnesserus, Severinus the Dane and some others among his followers demand as much: many of these patients, they say, can be cured only by magic.

Paracelsus is so adamant in favour of chemical medicines that he admits almost no other treatment into his cures, while ridiculing Hippocrates, Galen and all their followers. But I have already condemned magic and all such remedies, and will discuss chemistry elsewhere.

Many famous physicians—Ficino, Crato and Fernel—consider astrology necessary; others doubt it and reject it. I will not presume to decide the controversy myself: Johannes Hossurtus, Thomas Boderius, and Magini in the preface to his Mathematical Medicine, shall decide for me. “Many physicians,” he says, “reject astrology in medicine, saying that it is of no use: they attack this one art as reckless, as it were, and seek glory for themselves from their ignorance of it. But I will refute physicians through physicians who defend and practise it—Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna and others, who consider them butchers without it: ‘physicians ignorant of astrology are killers,’ and so on.”

Paracelsus goes further: he insists that his physician must be predestined to cure this particular person and this particular illness; that each birth chart must be examined; and that the time of treatment, the gathering of herbs and their administration must be governed by astrology. In this, Thurnesserus and some practitioners of astrological medicine are too superstitious, in my judgement. “Hellebore will help, but not always, and not when given by just any physician,” and so on. But I think these men are too dogmatic and too pleased with their own opinions.

But what am I doing, intervening in something beyond my grasp? A blind man cannot judge colours, and perhaps I cannot judge these matters. I would require only this much: honesty in every physician. He must not be excessively careless or greedy, making his patient his prey like a harpy; “for it is an executioner's business,” as Wecker observes, “to demand an enormous price in the midst of the very torments.” He must not, like a hungry surgeon, keep prolonging and dragging out his treatment as long as there is any hope of payment.

“A leech that will not let go of the skin until it is full of blood.”

Many of them, to get a fee, will give medicine to everyone who comes, even when there is no reason for it. In this way they “rouse a dormant disease,” as Heurnius complains: they stir up a silent illness, as often happens, which good counsel and advice alone might have successfully settled, or which could otherwise have been cured by regulating the six non-natural things.

This is “to wage war on nature”: to attack nature and make a strong body weak. Arnoldus, in his eighth and eleventh aphorisms, warns against it and expressly forbids it. A wise physician will give medicine only when necessary, and will first try a therapeutic diet before proceeding to treatment with medicines.

Elsewhere he mocks those who think they can “overcome demons and the mind's phantoms with long courses of syrups”: that they can purge away fantastic imaginings and the devil with medicine.

Another caution is that, if medicine is needed, they should proceed on sound grounds and not mistake the disease. “They are often deceived by the similarity of symptoms,” says Heurnius, and I could cite many consultations in which they have prescribed unsuitable medicine.

Sometimes they work too casually and fail to prescribe a proper course of treatment. To stir up the humour without purging it often does more harm than good. Montanus, in consultation 30, attacks such disturbances: they purge only halfway, exhaust nature and trouble the body to no purpose. It is a stubborn humour to purge. As Laurentius calls this disease, it is “the reproach of physicians”; Bessardus calls it “the scourge of physicians”—their lash. For that reason, it needs more careful attention.

Even if the patient is unwilling, says Laurentius—asking for help and then refusing it again—and even if he neglects his own health, a good physician ought not to abandon him without help. But most physicians err in the opposite direction: they prescribe too much medicine and exhaust their patients' bodies with continual potions, to no purpose.

Aetius, in the second discourse of the second Tetrabiblos, chapter 90, therefore insists that they give nature some respite and stop treatment from time to time. Laelius a Fonte of Gubbio, in his consultations, found it repeatedly confirmed by experience, as he testifies there, that patients who had taken a great deal of medicine to no purpose recovered when left to themselves. This is what Nicolas Piso and Donatus Altomarus constantly urge: “give nature rest”—allow nature to rest.