Physician's Art

And does not each art also yield us benefit that is peculiar to itself and not general, as for example medicine health, the pilot’s art safety at sea, and the other arts similarly?

But when he had agreed— Can we deny, then, said I, that neither does any physician in so far as he is a physician seek or enjoin the advantage of the physician but that of the patient?

Because you think that the shepherds and the neat-herds are considering the good of the sheep and the cattle and fatten and tend them with anything else in view than the good of their masters and themselves;

And the patient so forced might rightly say anything else rather than that he had been treated in a baneful or unscientific way by the physicians who used force upon him.

Would he not venture to substitute other rules for those written instructions if others happened to be better for his patients, because the winds or something else had, by act of God, changed unexpectedly from their usual course?

Whether they cure us against our will or with our will, by cutting us or burning us or causing us pain in any other way, and whether they do it by written rules or without them, and whether they are rich or poor, we call them physicians just the same, so long as they exercise authority by art or science, purging us or reducing us in some other way, or even adding to our weight, provided only that …