And add to my torment! I’m weary of life.”
Meantime our patient does not appear to have a robust faith in the humoral theories of his physician, for he adds, in accursing the malady that has ruined his health, that it permits him no repose:
“Mal que jamais l’homme n’a pu comprendre
Qui le plus sage induirait a se pendre.”
That is to say, that the doctors do not understand how to manage the disease, a common idea among patients who are not cured of their malady as speedily as they desire.
In one of the scenes the gout addresses a pompous eulogy on its power over humanity, and inveighs against those physicians who discover a new specific against gout every day. This list of remedies for the disease is appalling; we cull but a few to satisfy the reader’s curiosity:
“One advises flea wort and a parsley pill,
One eats fruit at morning, when with gout he’s ill,
One chews leaves of lettuce, one takes wild purslain;
Another smells pond lilies, when he doth complain.