Nine Books on the Nature of Things

Meanwhile I rightly exalt and honour spagyric physicians with the praise they deserve. They do not surrender to leisure and sloth, strut in proud dress clothed in silk, display rings on their fingers, hang silver daggers at their hips or turn fine gloves in their hands. They attend diligently to their work and sweat through whole days and nights among fiery furnaces. They do not pass the time strolling for pleasure, but find their delight in the laboratory. They wear garments of leather or hide, hanging an apron before them on which to wipe their hands. They put their fingers into charcoal, mud and dung, not into golden rings. Like smiths and charcoal burners they are sooty and dirty, and do not pride themselves on a polished face. They are not talkative at the sickbed and do not loudly praise their medicines, knowing that the work should praise the craftsman, not the craftsman his work, and that elegant words cannot cure the sick. Putting all these vanities aside, they rejoice in working around the fire and learning the stages of alchemical science: distillation, dissolution, putrefaction, extraction, calcination, reverberation, sublimation, fixation, separation, reduction, coagulation, tincture and the like.