22 Will I be fully cured?

How ruinous a farm has man taken in taking on himself?

How ready is the house every day to fall down and how is all the ground over-spread with weeds, all the body with diseases?

Not only every turf but every stone bears weeds; every muscle of the flesh, every bone of the body has some infirmity.

Every little flint upon the face of this soil has some infectious weed; every tooth in our head a pain.

Man is afraid of and yet ashamed of that fear of that sense of pain.

How dear and how often a rent does man pay for this farm? He pays twice a day in double meals.

How little time has he to earn the money to pay his rent? How many holy days to call him from his labour? Every day is half-holy day, half spent in sleep.

What reparations and subsidies and contributions must he pay besides his rent? What medicines besides his diet? What lodgers must he take in besides his own family, what infectious diseases from other men?

Adam might have had paradise in return for just working and keeping it. The labour would not have made his brow sweat.

And yet he gave it up.

How high a rent do we pay for this farm, this body?

Our labour does not end when we cut down some weed as soon as it springs up, correct some violent and dangerous accident of a disease which would have destroyed speedily.

Our labour does not end when we have pulled up that weed from the very root, recovered entirely and soundly from that particular disease.

The whole ground is of an ill nature, the whole soil ill disposed.

There are inclinations, propensities to disease in the body out of which without any other disorder diseases will grow.

And so we are put to a continual labour upon this farm, to a continual study of the whole complexion and constitution of our body.

In the distempers and diseases of soils - sourness, dryness, weeping, any kind of barrenness - the remedy is sometimes in themselves.

Sometimes the very situation relieves them. The wood on a hillside will vent its own malignant moisture.

The burning of the of the upper turf of some ground puts a new and a vigorous youth into that soils fruitfulness out of that which was barren before, and by that which is the most barren of all, ashes.

And where the ground cannot give itself physick, yet it receives physick from other soils which are not the worse for having contributed that help. From marl in other hills or from slimey sand in other shores.

But I have taken a farm at this hard rent and with such heavy covenants that it can afford itself no help.

No part of my body, if it were cut off, would cure another part. In some cases it might preserve a sound part, but in no case recover an infected one.

If my body may have any medicine from another body, from the flesh of another man (as by Mummy or any such concoction) it must be from a man that is dead.

Soils are never the worse for contributing their marl or their fat slime to my ground.

There is nothing in the same man to help Man, nothing in mankind to help one another by way of physick unless he who gives the help is just as badly off as he that receives it would have been if he had never received it.

For he from whose body the physick comes is dead.

When I took this farm, undertook this body, I undertook to drain not a marsh but a moat where all was water.

I undertook to prefume dung where no one part but all was equally unsavoury.

I undertook to make such a thing wholesome.

To cure the sharp accidents of diseases is a great work. To cure the disease itself is a greater.

But to cure the body, the root, the occasion of diseases is a work reserved for the great Physician which he does never any other way but by glorifying these bodies in the next world.


Phamaceutical note: Mummy is preparation of dead flesh preserved in bitumen, used for medicinal purposes