Preface

(which are either non-existent or harmful) they promise they will immediately cure all diseases. They boldly administer these remedies in every case, resulting in great harm and often the ruin of the sick person original: "ægrotantis". These butchers original: "carnifices"; Willis uses this harsh term for executioners or butchers to describe unlearned practitioners who risk their patients' lives through ignorance. are accustomed to playing with human skin so securely and recklessly, while they are led by no plan and no thread of method, but by mere chance and a certain blind impulse, in either the preparation or the administration of those medicines (in which a poisonous sting always lies hidden).

Therefore, it would be most highly desirable, both for the dignity and advancement of Medicine and for the care and safety of human health, that the energies and modes of operation of medicines in our bodies be revealed according to their individual nature and their quasi-mechanical reasons. For if it were clearly known in what manner medicines, once taken, exert their powers immediately in the first passages first passages original: "primis viis"; a traditional medical term referring to the stomach and intestines, the primary site of digestion and absorption., and from there soon spread those powers through the whole body; and what alterations those medicines undergo in individual regions; and likewise what effects they have upon the spirits, the blood, the humors, or the solid parts; then indeed pharmacy could be practiced much more safely and certainly, and with greater benefit to the patient.

This "Sparta" original: "Spartam hanc"; an allusion to the classical proverb "You have obtained Sparta, now adorn her," meaning one must fulfill the duty or task they have undertaken., namely the etiology etiology original: "Ætiologiam"; the study of causes or reasons behind a process. of pharmaceutical operation, which has remained almost untouched until now, if I now rashly