shivering upon me,” said he.  “That is good,” replied the physician.  After the third potion, he asked him again how he did:  “Why, I find myself swollen and puffed up,” said he, “as if I had a dropsy.”—­“That is very well,” said the physician.  One of his servants coming presently after to inquire how he felt himself, “Truly, friend,” said he, “with being too well I am about to die.”

There was a more just law in Egypt, by which the physician, for the three first days, was to take charge of his patient at the patient’s own risk and cost; but, those three days being past, it was to be at his own.  For what reason is it that their patron, AEsculapius, should be struck with thunder for restoring Hippolitus from death to life: 

         “Nam Pater omnipotens, aliquem indignatus ab umbris
          Mortalem infernis ad lumina surgere vitae,
          Ipse repertorem medicinae talis, et artis
          Fulmine Phoebigenam Stygias detrusit ad undas;”

["Then the Almighty Father, offended that any mortal should rise to the light of life from the infernal shades, struck the son of Phoebus with his forked lightning to the Stygian lake.”  —­AEneid, vii. 770.]

and his followers be pardoned, who send so many souls from life to death?  A physician, boasting to Nicocles that his art was of great authority:  “It is so, indeed,” said Nicocles, “that can with impunity kill so many people.”

As to what remains, had I been of their counsel, I would have rendered my discipline more sacred and mysterious; they begun well, but they have not ended so.  It was a good beginning to make gods and demons the authors of their science, and to have used a peculiar way of speaking and writing, notwithstanding that philosophy concludes it folly to persuade a man to his own good by an unintelligible way:  “Ut si quis medicus imperet, ut sumat:” 

     “Terrigenam, herbigradam, domiportam, sanguine cassam.”

     ["Describing it by the epithets of an animal trailing with its slime
     over the herbage, without blood or bones, and carrying its house
     upon its back, meaning simply a snail.”—­Coste]

It was a good rule in their art, and that accompanies all other vain, fantastic, and supernatural arts, that the patient’s belief should prepossess them with good hope and assurance of their effects and operation:  a rule they hold to that degree, as to maintain that the most inexpert and ignorant physician is more proper for a patient who has confidence in him, than the most learned and experienced whom he is not so acquainted with.  Nay, even the very choice of most of their drugs is in some sort mysterious and divine; the left foot of a tortoise, the urine of a lizard, the dung of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon; and for us who have the stone (so scornfully they use us in our miseries) the excrement