On Medicine in Eight Books

themselves, that I do not know whom among the moderns you could justly prefer to him. Nor does it matter for that praise whether he was a physician by speech alone or also by practice. For if it is always necessary for those things to unite, how many physicians are there today? You see that chair-bound i.e., academic or theoretical teachers of medicine generally cultivate the science more subtly than through practice, and do so out of that ambition which they call the veriscrutationem search for truth, so that they may win by talent and eloquence. Conversely, those who serve profit, knowing well that diseases are cured not by eloquence but by remedies, believe that it is enough to boast of secret remedies and display long lists of those they have cured, in order to please the people, from whom their importance is derived. Hippocrates certainly regards as physicians those who have acquired a true knowledge of the art for themselves; but he urges them to transfer it to use and to the benefit of those for whose sake it was invented. Is he to be thought wise who lights a lamp and places it under a bushel? He is wise, and