My ancestors had an aversion to physic by some occult and natural instinct; for the very sight of drugs was loathsome to my father.  The Seigneur de Gaviac, my uncle by the father’s side, a churchman, and a valetudinary from his birth, and yet who made that crazy life hold out to sixty-seven years, being once fallen into a furious fever, it was ordered by the physicians he should be plainly told that if he would not make use of help (for so they call that which is very often an obstacle), he would infallibly be a dead man.  That good man, though terrified with this dreadful sentence, yet replied, “I am then a dead man.”  But God soon after made the prognostic false.  The last of the brothers—­there were four of them—­and by many years the last, the Sieur de Bussaguet, was the only one of the family who made use of medicine, by reason, I suppose, of the concern he had with the other arts, for he was a councillor in the court of Parliament, and it succeeded so ill with him, that being in outward appearance of the strongest constitution, he yet died long before any of the rest, save the Sieur de Saint Michel.

’Tis possible I may have derived this natural antipathy to physic from them; but had there been no other consideration in the case, I would have endeavoured to have overcome it; for all these conditions that spring in us without reason, are vicious; ’tis a kind of disease that we should wrestle with.  It may be I had naturally this propension; but I have supported and fortified it by arguments and reasons which have established in me the opinion I am of.  For I also hate the consideration of refusing physic for the nauseous taste.

I should hardly be of that humour who hold health to be worth purchasing by all the most painful cauteries and incisions that can be applied.  And, with Epicurus, I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided, if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted, that will terminate in greater pleasures.  Health is a precious thing, and the only one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out, not only his time, sweat, labour, and goods, but also his life itself to obtain it; forasmuch as, without it, life is wearisome and injurious to us:  pleasure, wisdom, learning, and virtue, without it, wither away and vanish; and to the most laboured and solid discourses that philosophy would imprint in us to the contrary, we need no more but oppose the image of Plato being struck with an epilepsy or apoplexy; and, in this presupposition, to defy him to call the rich faculties of his soul to his assistance.  All means that conduce to health can neither be too painful nor too dear to me.  But I have some other appearances that make me strangely suspect all this merchandise.  I do not deny but that there may be some art in it, that there are not amongst so many works of Nature, things proper for the conservation of health:  that is most certain:  I very well know there are some simples that moisten, and others that dry;