The Arabs received medicine from the Greeks, and the Latins did likewise, adding new precepts and medicines of their own. Yet it remains so imperfect that practitioners’ ignorance, impostors, mountebanks, empirics, the disagreements of sects—almost as numerous as diseases—envy, greed and the like cause much harm among us. They differ so greatly in their consultations and prescriptions, often misunderstanding the patient’s constitution, disease and its causes, that they prescribe wholly contrary medicines. “One says this, another that,” from a desire to be different or simply to contradict. As someone said of Hadrian, “a multitude of doctors killed the ruler”: a multitude of physicians killed the emperor. “There is more danger from the physician than from the disease”—more danger from the doctor than the illness.

Besides, there is much deceit and malice among them. “All arts,” says Cardano, “admit cheating; medicine, among the rest, makes it peculiarly its own.” He tells of a physician named Curtius in Venice: because he was an outsider practising among them, the other physicians continually contradicted all his instructions.

If he prescribed hot medicines, they prescribed cold ones, “mixing cold remedies in place of hot, moist in place of cold, astringents in place of purgatives”—binding medicines instead of purges; “they threw everything into confusion.” If the patient died, “they condemned Curtius”: Curtius, who disagreed with them, had killed him. If he recovered, then they themselves had cured him.

There is much rivalry, deceit and malice among them. Even if they are honest and mean well, a dishonest apothecary who prepares and administers the medicine may do boundless harm through stale, outworn preparations, adulterated drugs, bad mixtures, substituting one ingredient for another, and so on. See Fuchs, book 1, section 1, chapter 8; Cordus’s Dispensatory; and Brasavola’s Examination of Simples, among others.

But their ignorance does more harm than their rashness. Their art—if it is an art—is wholly conjectural, uncertain, imperfect, and learned by killing people. They are a sort of butchers, leeches and killers, especially surgeons and apothecaries, who are indeed the physicians’ hangmen, “executioners,” and public headsmen. Yet, to tell the truth, physicians themselves are not far behind. For, according to that witty epigram by Maximilianus Urentius, what is the difference?

How does a surgeon differ from a physician? In this: The physician kills with drugs, the surgeon with his hand. Both seem to differ from the executioner only in this: They do more slowly what he does quickly.

But I return to their skill. Many diseases they cannot cure at all: apoplexy, epilepsy, stone, strangury, gout,

Medicine cannot remove the knotted swellings of gout.

Quartan fevers—even an ordinary fever sometimes baffles them all. They cannot so much as relieve it; they do not know how to assess it. By the pulse? Some hold that doctrine wholly superstitious, and I dare say boldly with Andrew Dudith that “the various pulses described by Galen are neither observed nor understood by anyone.” As for urine, it is “the physicians’ whore,” the most deceitful thing of all, as Pieter van Foreest and some other physicians have shown at length.

I say nothing of critical days, errors in indications, and so on. Even the most rational and skilful are so often mistaken that Tholosanus concludes: “I would rather trust and entrust myself to a mere empiric than to a mere doctor; and I cannot praise enough the Babylonians’ custom of having no professional physicians, but bringing all their patients to the marketplace to be cured.” Herodotus reports this of the Egyptians; Strabo, Sardus and Johannes Boemus report it of many other peoples.

Those who prescribed medicine among them did not arrogantly undertake to cure every disease, as our practitioners do. One treated this, another that, according to their skill and experience: “One treated the eyes, a second the teeth, a third the head, another the lower parts,” and so on. They worked for charity and to do good, not for profit, making no art, profession or trade of it, as was customary elsewhere.

Thus Cambyses, in Xenophon, told Cyrus that, in his view, “physicians were like tailors and cobblers: they mended our sick bodies as the others mended our clothes.” But I will press these carping, insulting arguments no further, lest some physician misunderstand me and refuse me medicine when I am ill. For my part, I think well of medicine: in this, as in many other arts and sciences, I can distinguish its abuse from its use. “Wine is one thing, drunkenness another”: wine and drunkenness are two distinct things.

I acknowledge it as a most noble and divine science, so much so that Apollo, Aesculapius and its earliest founders were “deservedly regarded as gods”—rightly counted gods by later ages for the excellence of their invention. Whereas Apollo at Delos, Venus at Cyprus, Diana at Ephesus and those other gods were confined to worship in particular places, Aesculapius had temples and altars everywhere—in Corinth, Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Epidaurus and elsewhere, as Pausanias records—because of the wide reach of his art, divinity, worth and necessity.

Together with all virtuous and wise people, therefore, I honour the name and calling, as I am commanded to “honour the physician because of your need of him. The physician’s knowledge raises his standing, and he will be admired in the sight of great men. The Lord has created medicines from the earth, and a wise person will not reject them”—Ecclesiasticus 58:1. How many worthy panegyrics have been written on this noble subject! For my part, as Sallust said of Carthage, “it is better to be silent than to say too little.” I have finished.