Timaeus — Plato

p. 92

The vanity of doctors and lawyers.

Republic III. Socrates, Glaucon. The luxurious style of living may be justly compared to the panharmonic strain of music.

Every man should be his own doctor and lawyer.

Bad as it is to go to law, it is still worse to be a lover of litigation.

Neither would you approve of the delicacies, as they are thought, of Athenian confectionary? Certainly not. All such feeding and living may be rightly compared by us to melody and song composed in the panharmonic style, and in all the rhythms. Exactly. There complexity engendered licence, and here disease ; whereas simplicity in music was the parent of temperance in the soul ; and simplicity in gymnastic of health in the body. Most true, he said.

But when intemperance and diseases multiply in a State, halls of justice and medicine are always being opened ; and the arts of the doctor and the lawyer give themselves airs, finding how keen is the interest which not only the slaves but the freemen of a city take about them. Of course.

And yet what greater proof can there be of a bad and disgraceful state of education than this, that not only artisans and the meaner sort of people need the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but also those who would profess to have had a liberal education?

Is it not disgraceful, and a great sign of the want of good-breeding, that a man should have to go abroad for his law and physic because he has none of his own at home, and must therefore surrender himself into the hands of other men whom he makes lords and judges over him? Of all things, he said, the most disgraceful.

Would you say * most,' I replied, when you consider that there is a further stage of the evil in which a man is not only a life-long litigant, passing all his days in the courts, either as plaintiff or defendant, but is actually led by his bad taste to pride himself on his Htigiousness ; he imagines that he is a master in dishonesty ; able to take every crooked turn, and wriggle into and out of every hole, bending like a withy and getting out of the way of justice: and all for what? — in order to gain small points not worth mentioning, he not knowing that so to order his life as to be able to do without a napping judge is a far higher and nobler sort of thing. Is not that still more disgraceful?

Asclepius mid Hcrodicns. 93 Yes, he said, that is still more disgraceful. Republic in.

Well, I said, and to require the help of medicine, not when Socrates, a wound has to be cured, or on occasion of an epidemic, but ^'"^"'^■on. lUst because, by indolence and a habit of life such as we have Bad also to ■' ■' , , require the been describing, men fill themselves with waters and winds, help of as if their bodies were a marsh, compelling the ingenious '"^d'^^'"^- sons of Asclepius to find more names for diseases, such as flatulence and catarrh; is not this, too, a disgrace?

Yes, he said, they do certainly give very strange and newfangled names to diseases.

Yes, I said, and I do not believe that there were any such in the time of diseases in the days of Asclepius ; and this I infer from the o/nomer thl circumstance that the hero Eurypylus, after he has been practice of wounded in Homer, drinks a posset of Pramnian wine well ^eV simple?^ 06 besprinkled with barley-meal and grated cheese, which are certainly inflammatory, and yet the sons of Asclepius who were at the Trojan war do not blame the damsel who gives him the drink, or rebuke Patroclus, who is treating his case.

Well, he said, that was surely an extraordinary drink to be given to a person in his condition. Not so extraordinary, I replied, if you bear in mind that The nursing in former days, as is commonly said, before the time of bega^n wUh Herodicus, the guild of Asclepius did not practise our pre- Herodicus. sent 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 hfe 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