4 The physician is sent for

It is too little to call Man a little World. Man is a diminutive to nothing except God.

Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world. And if those pieces were extended and stretched out, in man as they are in the world, Man would be the Giant and the world the Dwarf, the world but the Map, and the man the World.

If all the veins in our bodies were extended to rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that lie upon one another to hills, and all bones to quarries of stones, the air would be too little for this orb of Man to move in. The firmament would be but enough for this star.

Man has many pieces of which the whole world has no representation.

What creatures inhabit the World that is Man?

Our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born giants, that reach from east to west, from earth to heaven, that bestride all the sea and land. They span the sun and firmament. My thoughts reach all, comprehend all.

Inexplicable mystery; I their creator am in prison, in a sick bed. My creatures, my thoughts, are with the sun and beyond the sun, overtake the sun in one pace, one step everywhere.

And then as the other world produces serpents and vipers, malignant and venomous creatures, and worms and caterpillars that endeavour to devour the world which produces them, and monsters compiled of divers parents and kinds, so this world, our selves, produces all these in us.

We produce diseases and sicknesses of all sorts, venomous and infectious diseases, feeding and consuming diseases and manifold and entangled diseases made up of many several ones.

Can the other world name so many venomous, so many consuming, so many monstrous creatures as we can diseases of all these kinds?

O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches! How can we have remedies for every disease when as yet we have not names for them?

But we have a Hercules against these giants, these monsters: the physician. He musters up all the forces of the other world to succour this, all nature to relieve Man.

We have the physician but we are not the physician. Here we are less able than lesser creatures who are physicians to themselves.

The hart that is pursued and shot with an arrow knows a herb which will heal the wounds. The dog knows a grass that will cure his proverbial sickness.

And it may be true that common plants, easy to be had, would cure man, but Man has not that innate instinct to apply those natural medicines to his present danger as those inferior creatures have. He is not his own apothecary, his own physician, as they are.

What has become of Mans great extent and proportion when he shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust? What has become of his soaring thoughts when he brings himself to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessness of the grave?

His diseases are his own but the physician is not. He must send for the physician