Apothecary, barber, bathkeeper, and physician

Meaning

These occupational names mark several different judgments. Via warns that failed practitioners enrich apothecaries while impoverishing their households and damaging their health. Yet it concedes that processes useless for improving metals can sometimes benefit barbers, bathkeepers and physicians, and can earn medicine-makers a profit. That concession is not proof of universal medical safety: Via’s later attack on substitution must still be read. Nature’s dialogue makes another division, between physicians who mock alchemy without experience and approved ancient physicians or natural philosophers who supposedly knew it. The translation distinguishes “physicians” from “natural philosophers” where the German uses Medici and Physici. Neither companion simply condemns every healer, and their polemics are not a reliable account of every contemporary member of these occupations.