The Anatomy of Melancholy

MEMBER 2. Lawful cures, first from God.

Since it has been so clearly demonstrated that all unlawful cures must be refused, it remains to discuss those that may be accepted. These are generally the remedies God has appointed through the powers of stones, herbs, plants, foods and similar things, which physicians prepare and apply for our use through their skill and diligence. They distribute these treasures for our benefit and deserve to be honoured because we need them: they are God's intermediary ministers, to whom we should turn for help in our illnesses.

Yet we must not rely too much, or entirely, on them. “Begin with Jove”: we must begin with prayer and then use medicine—not one without the other, but both together.

To pray alone and reject ordinary means is to behave like the man in Aesop who, when his cart was stuck, lay on his back and cried aloud, “Help, Hercules!” That was of little use unless, as his friend advised him, “you yourself put your strength to the wheels”: he must also whip his horses and put his shoulder to the wheel. God works through means, as Christ cured the blind man with clay and spit.

“We should pray for a sound mind in a sound body.”

As we must pray for health of body and mind, so we must do everything we can to preserve and maintain it. Some kinds of devils can be cast out only by fasting and prayer, and both are necessary, not one without the other. All the medicine we can use, all our skill and outstanding diligence, are useless without calling upon God: “It does no good to promise Craterus enormous mountains of wealth.” It is useless to seek help, to run or ride in search of it, unless God blesses us.

“Sicilian feasts will yield no sweetness, nor will birdsong or the lyre's music [bring back sleep].”

“Neither house and land nor heaps of bronze and gold can drive the fever from their sick owner.”

With house, with land, with money and with gold, The owner's fever will not be controlled.

We must use prayer and medicine together. Then, without doubt, our prayers will be effective and our medicine take effect. This was Hezekiah's practice, in 2 Kings 20, and Luke the Evangelist's; it is also what we are commanded in Colossians 4. This applies to the physician as well as the patient. Hippocrates, though a pagan, required it in a good practitioner, as did Galen in On the Doctrines of Plato and Hippocrates, book 9, chapter 15, and in his treatise Whether Character Follows the Temperament of the Body, chapter 11. He repeatedly urges it, as do many others.