A MERE DULL PHYSICIAN.

His practice is some business at bedsides, and his speculation an urinal:  he is distinguished from an empiric, by a round velvet cap and doctor’s gown, yet no man takes degrees more superfluously, for he is doctor howsoever.  He is sworn to Galen and Hippocrates, as university men to their statutes, though they never saw them; and his discourse is all aphorisms, though his reading be only Alexis of Piedmont,[11] or the Regiment of Health.[12] The best cure he has done is upon his own purse, which from a lean sickliness he hath made lusty, and in flesh.  His learning consists much in reckoning up the hard names of diseases, and the superscriptions of gallipots in his apothecary’s shop, which are ranked in his shelves and the doctor’s memory.  He is, indeed, only languaged in diseases, and speaks Greek many times when he knows not.  If he have been but a bystander at some desperate recovery, he is slandered with it though he be guiltless; and this breeds his reputation, and that his practice, for his skill is merely opinion.  Of all odours he likes best the smell of urine, and holds Vespasian’s[13] rule, that no gain is unsavory.  If you send this once to him you must resolve to be sick howsoever, for he will never leave examining your water, till he has shaked it into disease:[l4] then follows a writ to his drugger in a strange tongue, which he understands, though he cannot construe.  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 head-ache; 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 carcase should bleed.[15] Anatomies, and other spectacles of mortality, have hardened him, and he is no more struck with a funeral than a grave-maker.  Noblemen use him for a director of their stomach, and the ladies for wantonness,[16] especially if he be a proper man.  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 alchemy, 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 ingendered out of man’s corruption.

AN ALDERMAN.