A feeble body makes a feeble mind. Hence the influence of physic,
an art which does more harm to man than all the evils it professes
to cure. I do not know what the doctors cure us of, but I know
this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity,
credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead
walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it
is men we need.

Medicine is all the fashion in these days, and very naturally. It
is the amusement of the idle and unemployed, who do not know what
to do with their time, and so spend it in taking care of themselves.
If by ill-luck they had happened to be born immortal, they would
have been the most miserable of men; a life they could not lose
would be of no value to them. Such men must have doctors to threaten
and flatter them, to give them the only pleasure they can enjoy,
the pleasure of not being dead.

I will say no more at present as to the uselessness of medicine. My
aim is to consider its bearings on morals. Still I cannot refrain
from saying that men employ the same sophism about medicine as
they do about the search for truth. They assume that the patient
is cured and that the seeker after truth finds it. They fail to see
that against one life saved by the doctors you must set a hundred
slain, and against the value of one truth discovered the errors
which creep in with it. The science which instructs and the medicine
which heals are no doubt excellent, but the science which misleads
us and the medicine which kills us are evil. Teach us to know
them apart. That is the real difficulty. If we were content to be
ignorant of truth we should not be the dupes of falsehood; if we