Attributing so much to natural causes,
That they have little faith in that they cannot
Deliver reason for; this doctor steers
Another course.[282]
We find them again in The Emperor of the East,[283] where a surgeon is contrasted with an empiric who vends his wares and talks much Latin, like the quack in Ben Jonson's Alchemist, while Paulinus complains of the many medical impostors who prey upon the rich. The crisis of The Duke of Milan[284] owes much to the action of doctors. The plot of A Very Woman hinges largely on the skill of the doctor Paulo, to whom we have referred above. In this play we have two victims of melancholy, Almira and Cardenes; the former is cured by falling in love with the disguised John Antonio; the latter is Paulo's patient. The recovery of the avaricious father in The Roman Actor[285] is due to Paris acting in the part of a doctor. The physician Dinant in The Parliament of Love gives the gallants a good lesson (IV., 5). And in The Picture[286] we find an elaborate simile, in which soldiers are said to be the surgeons of the State. In the same play Hilario,[287] when on starvation [pg 083] fare, is accosted by a surgeon, who invites him to sell himself for “a living anatomy to be set up in the surgeons' hall.” Such passages,[288] and the zest with which Massinger refers to potatoes, eringos, and the like,[289] together with the rather wearisome allusions which he makes to “caudles” and “cullises,”[290] lead us to wonder whether at one time of his life he may have seriously studied medicine. There is a significant passage in The Parliament of Love,[291] where Chamont says to the doctor Dinant,
Good master doctor, when your leisure serves,
Visit my house; when we least need their art,
Physicians look most lovely.
And close intercourse with doctors may have suggested the lines immediately below:
Novall. The knave is jealous.