The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.