ON THE CHEMICAL EPISTOLARY WORK OF ANDREAS LIBAVIUS, A Most Famous Man, Physician, and Poet

ELEGY OF D. BARTHOLOMEW HUBNER, Philosopher and Physician of Erfurt.

Since chemical medicines are no longer new, nor is the fact that today the doctor knows what the schools [knew]: But [what was] dug up from the ancient books of the Arabs and Saracens, now they shine with a more splendid countenance, and our pharmacies have long known them, and, augmented by these, have given them their place of their own accord: Thus they do not drive away all diseases from the body, nor do they establish new proofs of the art. They can only be called a part, but not the whole art of healing, if you weigh the matter with dexterity, and they adorn and accumulate the art of Machaon the son of Asclepius, a surgeon of Greek myth, and they serve it, they do not dominate it. The lying boast of the vain flock, which Paracelsus controversial 16th-century physician has as an admirer, therefore falls, and the bombastic dreams are confounded, through which many now wish to be physicians immediately, however much they grasp no art or method, which Hippocrates Greek physician teaches, which Galen Greek physician of the Roman Empire holds. Those who are of such petulant talent that they wish every doctrine of the ancients to have been of no value, and that the drugs not so often approved through all the centuries, and which the provident care of nature has given, confer nothing to human health, unless the fiery force of fire first renews them. And though they do not desire to know the powers of things, which the mother earth has given for our convenience; nor do they know how much Vulcan Roman god of fire can do in them, and which are apt for us, or less apt,