.
They have seen me and heard me, handcuffed me and received the evidence. I have cut up mine own anatomy, dissected myself and they are gone to read upon me.
We see physicians can scarce number nor name all sicknesses. Everything that disorders a faculty or its function is a sickness.
It is not enough just to name them after the affected part - pleurisy. Nor from the effect which it has - falling sickness. They cannot have names enough from what it does nor where it is, they must add names for what it is like, what it resembles, or else they would lack names - wolf and the canker and the polypus are so.
And that question whether there be more names or things is as perplexed in sicknesses as in anything else, except it be easily resolved. There are more sicknesses than names.
If there was only one kind of ruin, and man could perish only by sickness, yet his danger would be infinite. And if sicknesses were reduced to one - fever - yet the way were infinite still, for it would overload and oppress any natural disorder and discompose any artificial memory to deliver the names of several fevers.
How difficult then for those who have gone away to consult over which of these sicknesses mine is, and then what it will do and then how it may be cured.
But it is a degree of good when the evil will allow consultation.
In many diseases that which is but a symptom of the main disease is so violent that the physician must attend the cure of that, even though he delays the cure of the disease itself.
Is it not so in states too? Sometimes the arrogance of the powerful puts the people into commotions. The greatest danger to the head of state is the insolence of the powerful, and yet they execute martial law upon the common people whose commotion was indeed but a symptom, but an accident of the main disease. But this symptom grew so violent there was no time for a consultation.
Is it not so in the diseases of our mind too? In our moods, in our passions then? If a choleric man be ready to strike must I go to purge his anger or to break the blow?
But where there is room for consultation things are not desperate. They consult, so there is nothing rashly, inconsiderately done. And then they prescribe, they write, so there is nothing covertly, disguisedly, unavowedly done.
In bodily diseases it is not always so.
Sometimes as soon as the physicians foot is in the room his knife is in the patients arm. The disease would not allow a minutes delay nor prescribing of other remedies.
In matters of government it is so too.
They are sometimes surprised with such accidents as that the magistrate asks not what may be done by law but does that which must necessarily be done.
But it is a degree of good in evil, a degree that carries hope and comfort in it, when we may have recourse to that which is written and that the proceedings may be open and ingenuous and candid. That gives satisfaction and acquiescence.
They who have received my account of my symptoms consult and end their consultation in prescribing physick, a proper and convenient remedy.
If, instead, they came back and chided me for some behaviour that had occasioned and induced or that had hastened and exalted this sickness, or if they should begin to write now rules for my diet and exercise when I am well, this would not be treatment.
It were rather a vexation than a relief to tell a condemned prisoner You might have lived if you had done this, and If you can get your pardon you shall do well to take this or this course hereafter
I am glad they know (I have hid nothing from them), glad they consult (they hide nothing from one another), glad they write (they hide nothing from the world), glad that they write and prescribe physick, that there are remedies for the present case
