Declamation of the Philosopher, Physician, and Orator

From this, innumerable sects flowed, infinite dogmas, multiple opinions. Hence those miserable concertations concerning the sick, with no one agreeing for fear that he might seem to be an assertion of another. Hence that unhappy inscription on the monument: "The crowd of physicians killed me." And the Emperor Hadrian, as Dion is the author, said while dying: "The crowd of physicians kills the prince." With whom agrees that little verse celebrated among the Greeks in place of a proverb: pollon iatron eisodos m'apolesen The entry of many physicians destroyed me. Nor can I restrain myself from recounting those things of Pliny which are wonderfully pertinent to this whole business, in which that brilliant writer, in his peroration against physicians, asserts that no art has been more inconsistent than medicine, and that there is no doubt that physicians, hunting for the fame of all knowledge with some novelty, immediately trade in our souls. They learn through our dangers, and conduct experiments through deaths, and for a physician to have killed a man is the highest impunity; nay, more, it passes into abuse, and intemperance is blamed. If any law existed that would punish capital ignorance, you would see very few professors of medicine. The proverbial saying is well known: "The titles of physicians have remedies, the jars have poisons." Hence that saying of the Lacon to a physician saying "You have nothing wrong": "I do not use you as a physician." And again, when a physician had said: "You have become an old man," [the Lacon replied]: "Because I have not used you as a physician." And someone will say: we see daily many who were implicated in most grave and acute diseases recovered by the help of physicians. To which one can answer briefly with that of Ausonius: "He escaped by the help of fate, not the physician." On the other hand, you may see more succumb than recover, to whom the physicians—who are held the most famous of physicians—profited nothing. Furthermore, there were thousands of nations long ago, and there are in the present, living without physicians. We, however, live by the labor of others. We walk with the feet of others. We believe the promises of others. If my speech were not hurrying to the end, I could show that there are many names of medical things in Galen, Avicenna, and other most famous physicians, poorly understood, worse transmitted, and most foully misused. In which, with the loss of the life of mortals, the moderns hallucinate. And offering one thing for another, they often give a deadly potion instead of a life-saving one. For these reasons, we conclude clearly, O physician brother, that your discipline, which you boast of so much, is not as useful to health as it is detrimental. Cato is believed to have healthfully interdicted physicians; with whose oracle I shall close this disputation about physicians. The words of Cato are these: "Whenever that nation will give its literature, it will corrupt everything. Then even more so if it sends its physicians here."

The crowd of physicians kills.

Pliny's peroration against physicians.

Titles of remedies.

Jars of poisons.

Saying of a Lacon.

Error of modern physicians.

Cato on physicians.