On the Fabric of the Human Body

...carefully practiced it along with the other physicians of Asia. Indeed, none of the ancients failed to hand down to posterity the treatment performed by hand as attentively as they did the treatment achieved through diet and medication.

However, especially after the devastation of the Goths, when all the sciences—previously flourishing beautifully and practiced as was fitting—went to ruin, the more elegant physicians first in Italy began to disdain manual labor, following the imitation of the ancient Romans. They began to prescribe to servants those things that had to be done by hand for the sick, standing by them only in the manner of architects. Soon, as others also gradually avoided the inconveniences of practicing true medicine—meanwhile losing nothing of their profit or honor—they quickly degenerated from the ancient physicians. They left the method of cooking and all preparation of the patients' food to the caregivers, the composition of medicines to the pharmacists pharmacopolis: drug-sellers or apothecaries, and the work of the hands to the barbers tonsoribus: traditional barbers who, in this era, performed minor surgeries, bloodletting, and tooth extractions.

And so, with the passage of time, the method of healing was so miserably torn apart that physicians, selling themselves under the name of "natural philosophers" physicorum: meaning those who study the nature of the body and internal medicine, as opposed to manual surgeons, arrogated to themselves only the prescription of drugs and diet for hidden ailments. The rest of medicine they relegated to those they call Surgeons—whom they hardly regard even as servants—shamefully casting off the most important and ancient branch of medicine, which relies primarily on the observation of nature. Yet today, kings among the Indians especially practice this; the Persians hand it down by hereditary right to their children (just as the whole art of the followers of Aesculapius original: "Asclepiadum"; the Asclepiads were a guild of physicians in ancient Greece claiming descent from the god of healing once was); and the Thracians, along with many other nations, hold it in the highest honor and venerate it.

That part of the art has been nearly neglected which many once banished from the State, as if it were devised for mocking and killing men—since it accomplishes nothing without the help of nature. Indeed, when nature is busy struggling against disease, this part, while trying to help, frequently ruins everything and draws nature away from its duty entirely. This is why we especially owe it to those who, with so many insults usually hurled at doctors, mock this most sacred art. Yet that part of it which those trained in the liberal arts shamefully allow to be torn from them actually brings it the greatest praise.

For when Homer, the fountainhead of genius, affirms that a medical man is worth more than many others A reference to the Iliad, Book 11, where Homer praises the physician as being worth many soldiers, and celebrates Podalirius and Machaon with all the poets of Greece, these sons of the divine Aesculapius are not praised for removing a slight fever (which Nature alone usually heals more easily without the doctor’s help than with it), or for serving the palate of men in hidden and hopeless ailments. Rather, they are praised because they were primarily in charge of treating dislocations, fractures, contusions, wounds, and other ruptures of the body's continuity, and the flow of blood; and because they freed the most noble soldiers of Agamemnon from spears, arrows, and other such evils (which wars especially bring, and which always require the diligent work of a doctor).

But I have by no means proposed to prefer one instrument of medicine over the others, since the mentioned triple method of aid can by no means be separated or torn apart; the whole belongs to a single practitioner. To execute this properly, all parts of medicine should be equally established and prepared, so that each part is applied more successfully the more one joins them all together in turn. Moreover, it is entirely rare for a disease to occur that does not immediately require the triple instrument of protection: thus an appropriate diet must be established, and something must be attempted with medication and, finally, by hand. Therefore, the apprentices of this art should be encouraged in every way to disregard the whispers of those (Gods help us!) "natural philosophers" and—in the manner of the Greeks and as the nature and reasoning of the art strictly dictate—apply their hands also to healing. Let them not thereafter turn a mangled medicine into the ruin of common human life.