CHAP. 8.—EVILS ATTENDANT UPON THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE.
Cato, who wrote to this effect, died in his eighty-fifth year,
in the year of the City 605; so that no one is to suppose that
he had not sufficient time to form his experience, either with
reference to the duration of the republic, or the length of his
own life. Well then-are we to conclude that he has stamped
with condemnation a thing that in itself is most useful? Far
from it, by Hercules! for he subjoins an account of the medical
prescriptions, by the aid of which he had ensured to himself
and to his wife a ripe old age; prescriptions
1 upon which we are
now about to enlarge. He asserts also that he has a book of
recipes in his possession, by the aid of which he treats the
maladies of his son, his servants, and his friends; a book from
which we have extracted the various prescriptions according to
the several maladies for which they are employed.
It was not the thing itself that the ancients condemned, but
it was the art as then practised, and they were shocked, more
particularly, that man should pay so dear for the enjoyment of
life. For this reason it was, they say, that the Temple of
Æsculapius, even after he was received as a divinity, was built
without the City, and afterwards on an island;
2 for this reason, too, it was, that when, long after the time of Cato, the
Greeks were expelled from Italy, the physicians were not
3
exempted from the decree. And here I will
4 improve upon
the foresight displayed by them. Medicine is the only one of
the arts of Greece, that, lucrative as it is, the Roman gravity
has hitherto refused to cultivate. It is but very few of our
fellow-citizens that have even attempted it, and so soon as ever
they have done so, they have become deserters to the Greeks
forth with.
5 Nay, even more than this, if they attempt to treat
of it in any other language than Greek, they are sure to lose
all credit, with the most ignorant even, and those who do not
understand a word of Greek; there being all the less confidence
felt by our people in that which so nearly concerns their welfare, if it happens to be intelligible to them. In fact, this is
the only one of all the arts, by Hercules! in which the moment
a man declares
6 himself to be an adept, he is at once believed,
there being at the same time no imposture, the results of which
are more fraught with peril. To all this, however, we give
no attention, so seductive is the sweet influence of the hope
entertained of his ultimate recovery by each.
And then besides, there is no law in existence whereby
to punish the ignorance of physicians, no instance before us
of capital punishment inflicted. It is at the expense of our
perils that they learn, and they experimentalize by putting us
to death, a physician being the only person that can kill another with sovereign impunity. Nay, even more than this, all
the blame is thrown upon the sick man only; he is accused of
disobedience forthwith, and it is the person who is dead and
gone that is put upon his trial. It is the usage at Rome for
the decuries
7 to pass examination under the censorship of the
emperor, and for inquisitions to be made at our party-walls
8
even: persons who are to sit in judgment on our monetary
matters are sent for to Gades
9 and the very Pillars of Hercules;
while a question of exile is never entertained without a panel
of forty-five men selected for the purpose.
10 But when it is
the judge's own life that is at stake, who are the persons that
are to hold council upon it, but those who the very next moment
are about to take it!
And yet so it is, that we only meet with our deserts, no
one of us feeling the least anxiety to know what is necessary
for his own welfare. We walk
11 with the feet of other people,
we see with the eyes of other people, trusting to the memory of
others we salute one another, and it is by the aid of others that
we live. The most precious objects of existence, and the chief
supports
12 of life, are entirely lost to us, and we have nothing
left but our pleasures to call our own. I will not leave Cato
exposed to the hatred of a profession so ambitious as this, nor
yet that senate which judged as he did, but at the same time
I will pursue my object without wresting to my purpose the
crimes practised by its adepts, as some might naturally expect.
For what profession has there been more fruitful in poisonings,
or from which there have emanated more frauds upon wills
And then, too, what adulteries have been committed, in the
very houses of our princes even! the intrigue of Eudemus,
13
for example, with Livia, the wife of Drusus Cæsar, and that of
Valens with the royal lady previously mentioned.
14 Let us
not impute these evils, I say, to the art, but to the men who
practise it; for Cato, I verily believe, as little apprehended
such practices as these in the City, as he did the presence of
royal ladies
15 there.
I will not accuse the medical art of the avarice even of its
professors, the rapacious bargains made with their patients while
their fate is trembling in the balance, the tariffs framed upon
their agonies, the monies taken as earnest for the dispatching
of patients, or the mysterious secrets of the craft. I will not
mention how that cataract must be couched
16 only, in the eye,
in preference to extracting it at once—practices, all of them,
which have resulted in one very great advantage, by alluring
hither such a multitude of adventurers; it being no moderation on their part, but the rivalry existing between such
numbers of practitioners, that keeps their charges within moderation. It is a well-known fact that Charmis, the physician
17 already mentioned, made a bargain with a patient of
his in the provinces, that he should have two hundred thousand
sesterces for the cure; that the Emperor Claudius extorted
from Alcon, the surgeon,
18 ten millions of sesterces by way of
fine; and that the same man, after being recalled from his
exile in Gaul, acquired a sum equally large in the course of a
few years.
These are faults, however, which must be imputed to individuals only; and it is not my intention to waste reproof
upon the dregs of the medical profession, or to call attention to
the ignorance displayed by that crew,
19 the violation of all
regimen in their treatment of disease, the evasions practised in
the use of warm baths, the strict diet they imperiously prescribe, the food that is crammed into these same patients,
exhausted as they are, several times a day; together with a
thousand other methods of showing how quick they are to
change their mind, their precepts for the regulation of the
kitchen, and their recipes for the composition of unguents,
it being one grand object with them to lose sight of none
of the usual incitements to sensuality. The importation of
foreign merchandize, and the introduction of tariffs settled by
foreigners,
20 would have been highly displeasing to our ances-
tors, I can readily imagine; but it was not these inconveniences that Cato had in view, when he spoke thus strongly in
condemnation of the medical art.
"Theriace"
21 is the name given to a preparation devised by
luxury; a composition formed of six hundred
22 different ingredients; and this while Nature has bestowed upon us such
numbers of remedies, each of which would have fully answered
the purpose employed by itself! The Mithridatic
23 antidote
is composed of four and fifty ingredients, none of which are
used in exactly the same proportion, and the quantity prescribed is in some cases so small as the sixtieth part of one
denarius! Which of the gods, pray, can have instructed man
in such trickery as this, a height to which the mere subtlety
of human invention could surely never have reached? It
clearly must emanate from a vain ostentation of scientific skill,
and must be set down as a monstrous system of puffing off the
medical art.
And yet, after all, the physicians themselves do not understand this branch of their profession; and I have ascertained
that it is a common thing for them to put mineral vermilion
24
in their medicines, a rank poison, as I shall have occasion
25 to
show when I come to speak of the pigments, in place of Indian
cinnabar, and all because they mistake the name of the one
drug for that of the other! These, however, are errors which
only concern the health of individuals, while it is the practices
which Cato foresaw and dreaded, less dangerous in themselves
and little regarded, practices, in fact, which the leading men
in the art do not hesitate to avow, that have wrought
26 the
corruption of the manners of our empire.
The practices I allude to are those to which, while enjoying
robust health, we submit: such, for instance, as rubbing the body
with wax and oil,
27 a preparation for a wrestling match, by
rights, but which, these men pretend, was invented as a preservative of health; the use of hot baths, which are necessary,
they have persuaded us, for the proper digestion of the food,
baths which no one ever leaves without being all the weaker
for it, and from which the more submissive of their patients
are only carried to the tomb; potions taken fasting; vomits to
clear the stomach, and then a series of fresh drenchings with
drink; emasculation, self-inflicted by the use of pitch-plasters
as depilatories; the public exposure, too, of even the most delicate parts of the female body for the prosecution of these
practices. Most assuredly so it is, the contagion which has
seized upon the public morals, has had no more fertile source
than the medical art, and it continues, day by day even, to
justify the claims of Cato to be considered a prophet and an
oracle of wisdom, in that assertion of his, that it is quite sufficient to dip into the records of Greek genius, without becoming
thoroughly acquainted with them.
Such then is what may be said in justification of the senate
and of the Roman people, during that period of six hundred
years in which they manifested such repugnance to an art, by
the most insidious terms of which, good men are made to lend
their credit and authority to the very worst, and so strongly
entered their protest against the silly persuasions entertained by
those, who fancy that nothing can benefit them but what is
coupled with high price.
I entertain no doubt, too, that there will be found some to express their disgust at the particulars which I am about to give, in
relation to animals: and yet Virgil himself has not disdained
—when, too, there was no necessity for his doing so-to speak
of ants and weevils,
"And nests by beetles made that shun the light."
28
Homer,
29 too, amid his description of the battles of the gods,
has not disdained to remark upon the voracity of the common
fly; nor has Nature, she who engendered man, thought it beneath
her to engender these insects as well. Let each then make it
his care, not so much to regard the thing itself, as to rightly
appreciate in each case the cause and its effects.