admiration, and therefore novelties; studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature. If you fly physic in health altogether, it will be too strange for your body when you shall need it. If you make it too familiar, it will work no extraordinary effect when sickness cometh. I commend[1] rather some diet for certain seasons, than frequent use of physic, except it be grown into a custom. For those diets alter the body more, and trouble it less. Despise no new accident in your body, but ask opinion of it. In sickness, respect[2] health principally; and in health, action. For those that put their bodies to endure in health, may in most sicknesses, which are not very sharp, be cured only with diet and tendering.[3] Celsus[4] could never have spoken it as a physician, had he not been a wise man withal, when he giveth it for one of the great precepts of health and lasting, that a man do vary and interchange contraries, but with an inclination to the more benign extreme: use fasting and full eating but rather full eating; watching and sleep, but rather sleep; sitting, and exercise, but rather exercise; and the like. So shall nature be
- ↑ Commend. Recommend.
- ↑ Respect. To have regard to; to care for; to heed or consider.
"There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats;
For I am arm'd so strong in honesty,
That they pass by me as the idle wind,
Which I respect not."
Shakspere. Julius Caesar. iv. 3.
- ↑ Tendering. Cherishing, care.
- ↑ Aulus (or Aurelius) Cornelius Celsus, a Roman writer of the first half of the first century A.D. He wrote an encyclopedia, of which only De Medicina (Books 6–13) has come down to us. The quotation is from A. Cornelii Celsi De Medicina Liber I. Caput 1.
