I would not undertake the care of a feeble, sickly child, should he live to four score years.  I want no pupil who is useless alike to himself and others, one whose sole business is to keep himself alive, one whose body is always a hindrance to the training of his mind.  If I vainly lavish my care upon him, what can I do but double the loss to society by robbing it of two men, instead of one?  Let another tend this weakling for me; I am quite willing, I approve his charity, but I myself have no gift for such a task; I could never teach the art of living to one who needs all his strength to keep himself alive.

The body must be strong enough to obey the mind; a good servant must be strong.  I know that intemperance stimulates the passions; in course of time it also destroys the body; fasting and penance often produce the same results in an opposite way.  The weaker the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys.  All sensual passions find their home in effeminate bodies; the less satisfaction they can get the keener their sting.

A feeble body makes a feeble mind.  Hence the influence of physic, an art which does more harm to man than all the evils it professes to cure.  I do not know what the doctors cure us of, but I know this:  they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death.  What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.

Medicine is all the fashion in these days, and very naturally.  It is the amusement of the idle and unemployed, who do not know what to do with their time, and so spend it in taking care of themselves.  If by ill-luck they had happened to be born immortal, they would have been the most miserable of men; a life they could not lose would be of no value to them.  Such men must have doctors to threaten and flatter them, to give them the only pleasure they can enjoy, the pleasure of not being dead.

I will say no more at present as to the uselessness of medicine.  My aim is to consider its bearings on morals.  Still I cannot refrain from saying that men employ the same sophism about medicine as they do about the search for truth.  They assume that the patient is cured and that the seeker after truth finds it.  They fail to see that against one life saved by the doctors you must set a hundred slain, and against the value of one truth discovered the errors which creep in with it.  The science which instructs and the medicine which heals are no doubt excellent, but the science which misleads us and the medicine which kills us are evil.  Teach us to know them apart.  That is the real difficulty.  If we were content to be ignorant of truth we should not be the dupes of falsehood; if we did not want to be cured in spite of nature, we should not be killed by the doctors.  We should do well to steer clear of both, and we should evidently be the gainers.  I do not deny that medicine is useful to some men; I assert that it is fatal to mankind.