understands, though he cannot conster. If he see you himself, his
presence is the worst visitation: for if he cannot heal your sickness, he
will be sure to help it. He translates his apothecary's shop into your
chamber, and the very windows and benches must take physic. He tells you
your malady in Greek, though it be but a cold, or headach; which by good
endeavour and diligence he may bring to some moment indeed. His most
unfaithful act is, that he leaves a man gasping, and his pretence is,
death and he have a quarrel and must not meet; but his fear is, lest the
carkass should bleed.[13] Anatomies, and other spectacles of mortality,
have hardened him, and he is no more struck with a funeral than a
grave-maker. Noble-men use him for a director of their stomach, and ladies
for wantonness,[14] especially if he be a proper man.[15] If he be single,
he is in league with his she-apothecary; and because it is the physician,
the husband is patient. If he have leisure to be idle (that is to study,)
he has a smatch at alcumy, and is sick of the philosopher's stone; a
disease uncurable, but by an abundant phlebotomy of the purse. His two
main opposites are a mountebank and a good woman, and he never shews his
learning so much as in an invective against them and their boxes. In
conclusion, he is a sucking consumption, and a very brother to the worms,
for they are both engendered out of man's corruption.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] _The secretes of the reverende maister Alexis of Piemount, containyng
excellente remedies against diuers diseases_, &c. appear to have been a
very favourite study either with the physicians, or their patients, about
this period.

They were originally written in Italian, and were translated into English
by William Warde, of which editions were printed at London, in 1558, 1562,
1595, and 1615. In 1603, a _fourth_ edition of a Latin version appeared at
Basil; and from Ward's dedication to "the lorde Russell, erle of Bedford,"
it seems that the French and Dutch were not without so great a treasure in
their own languages. A specimen of the importance of this publication may
be given in the title of the first secret. "The maner and secrete to
conserue a man's youth, and to holde back olde age, to maintaine a man
always in helth and strength, as in the fayrest floure of his yeres."

[10] _The Regiment of Helthe_, by Thomas Paynell, is another volume of the
same description, and was printed by Thomas Berthelette, in 1541.