176 ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. [Book 



not doubt to note as a deficience, that they inquire not the perfect cures 

 of many diseases, or extremities of diseases, but pronouncing them 

 incurable, do enact a law of neglect, and exempt ignorance from dis 

 credit. 



Nay farther, I esteem it the office of a physician not only to restore 

 health, but to mitigate pain and dolors, and not only when such 

 mitigation may conduce to recovery, but when it may serve to make a 

 fair and easy passage : for it is no small felicity which Augustus Caesar 

 was wont to wish to himself, that same euthanasia, and which was 

 specially noted in the death of Antoninus Pius, whose death was after 

 the fashion and semblance of a kindly and pleasant sleep. So it is 

 written of Epicurus, that after his disease was judged desperate, he 

 drowned his stomach and senses with a large draught and ingurgitation 

 of wine ; whereupon the epigram was made, &quot;Hinc Stygias ebrius 

 hausit aquas : &quot; he was not sober enough to taste any bitterness of 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 attendances for the facilitating and asswaging of 

 the pain and agonies of death. 



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

 the receipts of propriety, respecting the particular cures of 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 disease ; for 

 except it be treacle, and Mithridalum, and of late diascordium, and a 

 few more, they tic themselves to no receipts severely and religiously : 

 for as to the confections of sale which are in the shops, they are for 

 readiness, and not for propriety ; for they are upon general intentions 

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

 to particular diseases ; and this is the cause why empirics and old 

 women are more happy many times in their cures thau 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 traditions of empirics, set down 

 and delivered over certain experimental medicines for the cure of par 

 ticular diseases, besides their own conjectural and magistral de 

 scriptions. 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 being learned, incline to the 

 traditions of experience, or being empirics, incline to the methods of 

 learning. 



In preparation of medicines, I do find strange, especially, con 

 sidering how mineral medicines have been extolled, and that they are 

 safer for the outward than inward parts, that no man hath sought to 

 make an imitation by art of natural baths, and medicinable fountains, 



