r fear men should at any time escape their authority. Do they not,
from a continual and perfect health, draw the argument of some great
sickness to ensue? I have been sick often enough, and have always found
my sicknesses easy enough to be supported (though I have made trial of
almost all sorts), and as short as those of any other, without their
help, or without swallowing their ill-tasting doses. The health I have
is full and free, without other rule or discipline than my own custom and
pleasure. Every place serves me well enough to stay in, for I need no
other conveniences, when I am sick, than what I must have when I am well.
I never disturb myself that I have no physician, no apothecary, nor any
other assistance, which I see most other sick men more afflicted at than
they are with their disease. What! Do the doctors themselves show us
more felicity and duration in their own lives, that may manifest to us
some apparent effect of their skill?

There is not a nation in the world that has not been many ages without
physic; and these the first ages, that is to say, the best and most
happy; and the tenth part of the world knows nothing of it yet; many
nations are ignorant of it to this day, where men live more healthful and
longer than we do here, and even amongst us the common people live well
enough without it. The Romans were six hundred years before they
received it; and after having made trial of it, banished it from the city
at the instance of Cato the Censor, who made it appear how easy it was to
live without it, having himself lived fourscore and five years, and kept
his wife alive to an extreme old age, not without physic, but without a
physician: for everything that we find to be healthful to life may be
called physic. He kept his family in health, as Plutarch says if I
mistake not, with hare's milk; as Pliny reports, that the Arcadians
cured all manner of diseases with that of a cow; and Herodotus says, the
Lybians generally enjoy rare health, by a custom they have, after their
children are arrived to four years of age, to burn and cauterise the
veins of their head and temples, by which means they cut off all
defluxions of rheum for their whole lives. And the country people of our
province make use of nothing, in all sorts of distempers, but the
strongest wine they can get, mixed with a great deal of saffron and
spice, and always with the same success.

And to say the truth, of all this diversity and