The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.