impostor, and as his successors, Phaon, Podalirius, Melampius, Menecrates, (another God), by charms, spells, and ministry 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’ Dispensatory, and Brassivola’s Examen simpl., &c.  But it is their ignorance that doth more harm than rashness, their art is wholly conjectural, if it be an art, uncertain, imperfect, and got by killing of men, they are a kind of butchers, leeches, men-slayers; chirurgeons and apothecaries especially, that are indeed the physicians’ hangman, carnifices, and common executioners; though to say truth, physicians themselves come not far behind; for according to that facete epigram of Maximilianus Urentius, what’s the difference?