You will tell me, as usual, that the doctors are to blame, that medicine herself is infallible.  Well and good, then give us the medicine without the doctor, for when we have both, the blunders of the artist are a hundredfold greater than our hopes from the art.  This lying art, invented rather for the ills of the mind than of the body, is useless to both alike; it does less to cure us of our diseases than to fill us with alarm.  It does less to ward off death than to make us dread its approach.  It exhausts life rather than prolongs it; should it even prolong life it would only be to the prejudice of the race, since it makes us set its precautions before society and our fears before our duties.  It is the knowledge of danger that makes us afraid.  If we thought ourselves invulnerable we should know no fear.  The poet armed Achilles against danger and so robbed him of the merit of courage; on such terms any man would be an Achilles.

Would you find a really brave man?  Seek him where there are no doctors, where the results of disease are unknown, and where death is little thought of.  By nature a man bears pain bravely and dies in peace.  It is the doctors with their rules, the philosophers with their precepts, the priests with their exhortations, who debase the heart and make us afraid to die.

Give me a pupil who has no need of these, or I will have nothing to do with him.  No one else shall spoil my work, I will educate him myself or not at all.  That wise man, Locke, who had devoted part of his life to the study of medicine, advises us to give no drugs to the child, whether as a precaution, or on account of slight ailments.  I will go farther, and will declare that, as I never call in a doctor for myself, I will never send for one for Emile, unless his life is clearly in danger, when the doctor can but kill him.

I know the doctor will make capital out of my delay.  If the child dies, he was called in too late; if he recovers, it is his doing.  So be it; let the doctor boast, but do not call him in except in extremity.

As the child does not know how to be cured, he knows how to be ill.  The one art takes the place of the other and is often more successful; it is the art of nature.  When a beast is ill, it keeps quiet and suffers in silence; but we see fewer sickly animals than sick men.  How many men have been slain by impatience, fear, anxiety, and above all by medicine, men whom disease would have spared, and time alone have cured.  I shall be told that animals, who live according to nature, are less liable to disease than ourselves.  Well, that way of living is just what I mean to teach my pupil; he should profit by it in the same way.

Hygiene is the only useful part of medicine, and hygiene is rather a virtue than a science.  Temperance and industry are man’s true remedies; work sharpens his appetite and temperance teaches him to control it.