Advancement of Learning 1 1 5 



the Stygian water. But the physicians contrariwise do 

 make a kind of scruple and religion to stay with the patient 

 after the disease is deplored; whereas, in my judgment, 

 they ought both to inquire the skill and to give the atten 

 dances for the facilitating and assuaging of the pains and 

 agonies of death. 



In the consideration of the cures of diseases, I find a 

 deficience in the receipts of propriety, 1 respecting the 

 particular cures and diseases: for the physicians have 

 frustrated the fruit of tradition and experience by their 

 magistralities, in adding, and taking out, and changing quid 

 pro quo, in their receipts at their pleasures ; commanding so 

 over the medicine, as the medicine cannot command over 

 the diseases: for except it be treacle and mithridatum? 

 and of late diascordium, and a few more, they tie themselves 

 to no receipts severely and religiously : for as to the confec 

 tions of sale which are in the shops, they are for readiness 

 and not for propriety ; for they are upon general intention 

 of purging, opening, comforting, altering, and not much 

 appropriate to particular diseases : and this is the cause why 

 empirics and old women are more happy many times 

 in their cures than learned physicians, because they are 

 more religious in holding their medicines. Therefore here 

 is the deficience which I find, that physicians have not, 

 partly out of their own practice, partly out of the constant 

 probations reported in books, and partly out of the tradi 

 tions of empirics, set down and delivered over certain 

 experimental medicines for the cure of particular diseases, 

 besides their own conjectural and magistral descriptions. 

 For as they were the men of the best composition in the 

 state of Rome, which either being consuls inclined to the 

 people, or being tribunes inclined to the senate; so in the 

 matter we now handle, they be the best physicians, which 



1 Receipts of propriety, i.e. proper or fit for each particular disease. 



* Treacle and mithridatum. In the frontispiece to the edition of 

 Hippocrates, which I consulted, Q-rjpiaitbv and Mi0/i5an/c6j were 

 placed side by side as the chief remedies. By treacle (therias) is 

 meant, not the syrup of sugar, etc., but a composition of the parts 

 of vipers ; good for the cure of serpents bites, and for other medicinal 

 purposes. Mithridate (from king Mithridates antidote) was a 

 medicine of general use. &quot; Was it not strange, a physician should 

 decline exhibiting of Mithridate, because it was a known medicine, 

 and famous for its cures many ages since? &quot; Boyle s Works, ii. 

 p. 218. Diascordium is said to have been invented by Fracastorius. 



