SALT, SOUR, SWEET, Bitter—these four savors a body accepts, but how often foolish men misapply the fragile cup consigned to their use. We have been offered a cornucopia of pleasures such as spiced wine to accompany our meals, music urging us to dance, friends for conversation, illustrated manuscripts for enlightenment, docile beasts, et cetera. Still we expend this provender immoderately by giving way to intemperance—raging against our fate—unlike animals which do not doubt themselves and thus live comfortably. Subordinate creatures refuse to eat or drink injurious material, selecting instead what nutriment they require through natural instinct whereas men yield to gluttony, swallow foreign liquid, make flatulent speeches, load their bellies with carnage, defile themselves, rake over the world and succumb to grief.
CONSUMING SANGUINE BARNYARD flesh is perilous because it rots and makes wind, thwarting rectification of the blood, whereas the meat of birds is salubrious because these creatures subsist upon aether—the noblest constituent. Legumes are believed to accumulate their strength from diurnal quantities of sunlight which is released into our bodies, hence such plants are good and do not inflame choleric humors. Solar foods are beneficial to humanity, for should any organ conflate or grow distempered others miscarry—as if the fifth string of a musical instrument should be tight or loose. Now, because this is not mysterious I feel puzzled that the less knowledge blundering doctors have the less they covet to know. Myself, I would not maunder about as I hear others do, hiding ignorance or flaccid uncertainty behind confident prescription. I would as soon dance the jig with some itinerant minstrel or frolic in the hay with goats. I regard this earth as an infirmary, and I am but one earnest doctor in search of the Great Catholicon.
SPURIOUS PHYSICIANS STROKE their beards while hawking unguents extracted from tragacanth, verdigris and fat—as a mendacious moon does falsely tint familiar objects to make the gullible exclaim at counterfeit spectacles and rejoice and clap hands, thankful to sensory illusion. Honest practitioners seek truth in spiritual verity, reason in moral certitude.
RECEIPTS AND MAGISTRALS past counting have left us unequally perplexed, but through systematic observation various matters which astonish us may be resolved, lessening our amazement. Aristotle writes upon a Greek afflicted with defective vision that caused the atmosphere about him to act as a looking-glass while optical streams from his eyes, being reflected backward, threw forth an image of himself which faced and preceded him where he walked. So do most men agree to mistaken adumbrations for the probable semblance of themselves, inanimate and hollow. Did not Olympiodorus mention a natural deficit to understanding? Did he not speak of conceptions that lie askew?
VAN HELMONT DISCUSSES an old woman cured of noxious megrim by a touch, and he speaks of an abbess with a distended arm that could not bend her fingers for at least eighteen years, but she recovered by the application of lictus to her tongue. I think humors as qualities in themselves do not exemplify health, being little more than conditions neither indigenous nor natural. Bostock asserts that these might not be a cause so much as caused. Perhaps. I subscribe to several minds.
IN THE CITY of Frankfort is alleged to be a Dominican by name Uldericus Balk who employs a magnetic analeptic for jaundice or dropsy which is made from five drops of a sick man’s blood rehabilitated in the shell of a speckled egg. Being fortified with animal meat and set on the ground before a famished dog Balk’s lincture acts vehemently against disease by expelling it out of the patient and causing it to reappear in the creature—much as that leprosie in ancient times passed through Naaman into Gehazi. This seems possible. I myself effect sympathetic recures by a withdrawal of blood to attract mumia. Extraction through cupping, plus venesection, ensures an adequate supply which is given to a surrogate after boiling with onager milk. Even so, I judge the comportment of a doctor more efficacious than his remedy, more puissant than his finest drug.
I THINK DISEASE results from an overflow of corrosive catarrh which descends from the base of the skull to visceral organs. If fluid reaches the lung we may expect apostema and phthisis, in the joints we anticipate rheumatism and gout, in the legs ulceration and decay. Such ailments derive from the treachery of malignant or idle planets—which is commonly acknowledged. Nonetheless, it seems that by admitting the physician with his corrective, providence has imagined and conceived of balance.
SURELY A SUBJUNCTION of astronomy with medicine directs us at our labor because we have seen duplicated in laboratories a macrocosmic circulation of celestial agents that resembles falling rain or the pulsing motion of blood. Venus and Mars and a red moon in trilateral opposition revive old disorders while new configurations of Saturn introduce fresh disease. What is the attribute of Mars if not aetherial modes of iron distributed broadly down the progress of nature? And Venus? The power to stimulate vasa spermatica in masculine bodies. Or what is Melissa? We know it to be a subtle astral essence choosing materiate expression in the humblest garden plant. Or what is some animal if not a personification of sidereal human characteristics? Page after page therefore illustrates universal correspondence. That being so, terrestrial events must derive from the absolute harmony of heaven since beams of starlight fall indiscriminately across the earth. And as the nature of light is to flow continually, without respite, what fugitive phenomenon could be out-cast?
IF IT IS verified that stars have both their amicabilities and enmities, being given to mutual attraction or repulsion, each withdrawing or venturing toward an area of its neighbor, such coordination could not exist but for conscious empathy. So does Roger Bacon argue how those luculent encrustations that like a cascanet of jewels embellish the
