His disease
is only in his judgment, which makes him believe a doctor can fetch it
out of his stomach or his belly, and fright those worms out of his guts
that are bred in his brain. He believes a doctor is a kind of conjurer
that can do strange things, and he is as willing to have him think so;
for by that means he does not only get his money, but finds himself in
some possibility by complying with that fancy to do him good for it,
which he could never expect to do any other way; for, like those that
have been cured by drinking their own water, his own imagination is a
better medicine than any the doctor knows how to prescribe, even as the
weapon-salve cures a wound by being applied to that which made it. He is
no sooner well but any story or lie of a new famous doctor or strange
cure puts him into a relapse, and he falls sick of a medicine instead of
a disease, and catches physic like him that fell into a looseness at the
sight of a purge. He never knows when he is well or sick, but is always
tampering with his health till he has spoiled it, like a foolish
musician that breaks his strings with striving to put them in tune; for
Nature, which is physic, understands better how to do her own work than
those that take it from her at second hand. Hippocrates says, _Ars
longa, vita brevis_, and it is the truest of all his aphorisms--
"For he that's given much to the long art
Does not prolong his life, but cut it short."
THE MISER
Is like the sea, that is said to be richer than the land, but is not
able to make any use of it at all, and only keeps it from those that
know how to enjoy it if they had it.
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