y of bad spirits, performed most of their cures.
The first that ever wrote in physic to any purpose, was Hippocrates, and
his disciple and commentator Galen, whom Scaliger calls _Fimbriam
Hippocratis_; but as [4088]Cardan censures them, both immethodical and
obscure, as all those old ones are, their precepts confused, their
medicines obsolete, and now most part rejected. Those cures which they did,
Paracelsus holds, were rather done out of their patients' confidence,
[4089]and good opinion they had of them, than out of any skill of theirs,
which was very small, he saith, they themselves idiots and infants, as are
all their academical followers. The Arabians received it from the Greeks,
and so the Latins, adding new precepts and medicines of their own, but so
imperfect still, that through ignorance of professors, impostors,
mountebanks, empirics, disagreeing of sectaries, (which are as many almost
as there be diseases) envy, covetousness, and the like, they do much harm
amongst us. They are so different in their consultations, prescriptions,
mistaking many times the parties' constitution, [4090]disease, and causes
of it, they give quite contrary physic; [4091]"one saith this, another
that," out of singularity or opposition, as he said of Adrian, _multitudo
medicorum principem interfecit_, "a multitude of physicians hath killed the
emperor;" _plus a medico quam a morbo periculi_, "more danger there is from
the physician, than from the disease." Besides, there is much imposture and
malice amongst them. "All arts" (saith [4092]Cardan) "admit of cozening,
physic, amongst the rest, doth appropriate it to herself;" and tells a
story of one Curtius, a physician in Venice: because he was a stranger, and
practised amongst them, the rest of the physicians did still cross him in
all his precepts. If he prescribed hot medicines they would prescribe cold,
_miscentes pro calidis frigida, pro frigidis humida, pro purgantibus
astringentia_, binders for purgatives, _omnia perturbabant_. If the party
miscarried, _Curtium damnabant_, Curtius killed him, that disagreed from
them: if he recovered, then [4093]they cured him themselves. Much
emulation, imposture, malice, there is amongst them: if they be honest and
mean well, yet a knave apothecary that administers the physic, and makes
the medicine, may do infinite harm, by his old obsolete doses, adulterine
drugs, bad mixtures, _quid pro quo_, &c. See Fuchsius _lib. 1. sect. 1.
cap. 8._ Cordus'