Member 1 Subsection 1 Medical treatment by medicines

After a long and tedious discussion of these six non-natural things and their several adjustments, all of which come under regimen, I have now at last reached pharmaceutics: the branch of medicine that cures through remedies, which apothecaries generally prepare, compound or sell in their shops.

Many find fault with this kind of medicine and consider it unnecessary and useless for this or any other illness, because the countries that use it least enjoy the longest lives and the best health. Hector Boece reports that the people of the Orkney Islands remain sound in body and mind without using medicine, and commonly live for 120 years. Ortelius likewise says in his Itinerary that the inhabitants of the Forest of Arden “are very hardworking, long-lived and healthy,” and so on.

Martianus Capella, speaking of the Indians of his time, says that they were, much like the Indians of the West in our own day, “larger than ordinary men, roughly brought up and very long-lived, so that anyone who died at a hundred died before his time,” and so on.

Damião de Góis, Saxo Grammaticus and Johannes Boemus say the same of those who live in Norway, Lapland, Finnmark, Biarmia, Karelia, throughout Scandinavia and in those northern countries: they are exceptionally healthy and long-lived, although medicine is never used there and its very name is unheard of.

Dithmar Blefken, in his accurate description of Iceland published in 1607, mentions, among other things, the inhabitants and their way of life: “They eat dried fish instead of bread, butter, cheese and salted meat, and chiefly drink water and whey; yet without medicine or physician many of them live for 250 years.” I find the same account in Léry and some other writers on the Indians of America.

Paolo Giovio, in his description of Britain, and Levinus Lemnius make the same observation about our own island: in former times medicine was not used among us, and it is little used even now, except by a few fastidious, idle townsmen, overfed courtiers and stall-fed, loutish gentlemen. Country people use kitchen remedies, and common experience tells us that those who use apothecaries’ medicines least live most free of every kind of infirmity.

Many are ruined by its improper use, and meet their death through it when they might otherwise have escaped. Some think physicians kill as many as they save; and who can tell—

How many patients Themison killed in a single autumn?

How many murders they commit in a year, “those who are allowed to kill a person with impunity”—who may freely kill people and be paid for it! As the Dutch proverb says, a new physician must have a new churchyard. Who does not observe it daily? Many who fared badly in physicians’ hands have fortunately recovered after the doctors gave them up, leaving them to God, nature and themselves.

This was Pliny’s old dilemma: “Every disease is either curable or incurable: a person recovers from it or is killed by it. Either way, medicine must be rejected. If it is fatal, it cannot be cured; if it can be remedied, it needs no physician, for nature will expel it by itself.”

Plato considered an abundance of lawyers and physicians a strong sign of an intemperate and corrupt commonwealth. The Romans disliked physicians so much that they were often banished from their city; according to Pliny and Celsus, they were not admitted for 600 years.

Some hold that it is no art at all, not even worthy of the name of a liberal science—and neither is law. Pietro Andrea Canonhiero, a Roman patrician and himself a distinguished doctor, “one of their own tribe,” proves this by sixteen arguments: as now practised, it is mercenary and base, like fiddlers playing for pay. “Lawyers, physicians and the treasury may lawfully live by plunder.” It is a corrupt trade, no science, art or profession; its origins, practice and development are all bad, full of deceit and uncertainty, and it generally does more harm than good.

The devil himself first invented it. “Medicine is my invention,” said Apollo—and what was Apollo but the devil? The Greeks first made an art of it, and they were all deceived by Apollo’s sons, priests and oracles. If we may believe Varro, Pliny and Columella, most of their best medicines came from his oracles.

His son Aesculapius had temples erected to his divinity and performed many famous cures. Yet, as Lactantius holds, he was a magician, a mere impostor, and, like his successors Phaon, Podalirius, Melampius and Menecrates—another god—performed most of these cures through charms, spells and the service of evil spirits.

The first to write anything worthwhile on medicine were Hippocrates and his disciple and commentator Galen, whom Scaliger calls “the fringe of Hippocrates.” But Cardano criticizes both as disorganized and obscure, like all those ancient writers: their precepts confused, their medicines obsolete and now mostly rejected.

Paracelsus holds that the cures they achieved owed more to their patients’ confidence and good opinion of them than to their own skill, which, he says, was very slight. They themselves were ignorant men and mere children, as are all their academic followers.