The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.