replied, if you bear in mind that in former
days, as is commonly said, before the time of Herodicus, the guild of
Asclepius did not practise our present system of medicine, which may be
said to educate diseases. But Herodicus, being a trainer, and himself of
a sickly constitution, by a combination of training and doctoring found
out a way of torturing first and chiefly himself, and secondly the rest
of the world.

How was that? he said.

By the invention of lingering death; for he had a mortal disease which
he perpetually tended, and as recovery was out of the question, he
passed his entire life as a valetudinarian; he could do nothing but
attend upon himself, and he was in constant torment whenever he departed
in anything from his usual regimen, and so dying hard, by the help of
science he struggled on to old age.

A rare reward of his skill!

Yes, I said; a reward which a man might fairly expect who never
understood that, if Asclepius did not instruct his descendants
in valetudinarian arts, the omission arose, not from ignorance or
inexperience of such a branch of medicine, but because he knew that in
all well-ordered states every individual has an occupation to which he
must attend, and has therefore no leisure to spend in continually being
ill. This we remark in the case of the artisan, but, ludicrously enough,
do not apply the same rule to people of the richer sort.

How do you mean? he said.

I mean this: When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough
and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,--these
are his remedies. And if some one prescribes for him a course of
dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and
all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be
ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing
his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore
bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary
habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his
constitution fails, he dies and has no more trouble.

Yes, he said, and a man in his condition of life ought to use the art of
medicine thus far only.

Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in his
life if he were deprived of his occupation?

Quite true, he said.

But with the rich man this is otherwise; of him we do not say that he
has any specially appointed work which he