Theses inaugurales et medicae de podagrica affectione

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TO THE MAGNIFICENT MAN,
EMINENT IN THE SPLENDOR OF HIS LINEAGE, VIRTUES, AND AUTHORITY, Lord EBERHARD MOLLER,
well-deserving Consul of the Republic of Hamburg, his most highly honored Lord and Patron.

THINKING about the Republic of the Illustrious City of Hamburg, my sweetest fatherland, flourishing at this time, by the grace of God the Best and Greatest, and congratulating it on its aristocratic government, greatly approved by prudent men, there always come to mind those two illustrious Apophthegms, one of which belongs to Plato, the Prince of Philosophers, and the other to Hippocrates, the leader of Physicians. For just as the former said, no less truly than elegantly, that those polities are blessed whose governors are either Philosophers, that is, lovers of wisdom, or lovers of philosophers, because he judged that a perpetual study and exercise of civil prudence is necessary for the Republic, so the latter, writing to the Senate and the people of Abdera, pronounced very sagely that those peoples are blessed who know that good men are their protection, and not towers or walls, but the wise counsels of wise men. Truly, however, subscribing to these two Princes of classic philosophers and physicians, Demosthenes judged that one heroic man illuminates the whole race. Therefore, I congratulate you, Magnificent Man, on my fatherland, which is ἀγαθὴ κροτρόφος a good nurse of youth (as Homer speaks of Ithaca), both for your civic fortitude and for the counsels which have been salutary to it until now. Privately, however, I congratulate your Magnificence in the name of your most excellent son, Lord VINCENTIUS (who, at this very time, by public testimony for his outstanding erudition in Civil Law, began to be honored by the predecessors of Law of the most lauded Academy of Basel, where the most celebrated Physicians of that same Academy decided to confer upon me the Asclepiadean laurel), who, by the propitious providence of God, enjoys such happiness that he has cause to glory in his most lauded parents, and the parents in turn congratulate themselves on a son of such talent and virtue.