Madam, address your orders to the Author of nature. The sole power which made millions of planets and comets to revolve round millions of suns has directed the course of your blood.
PRINCESS.
What! are you a physician, and can you prescribe nothing?
PHYSICIAN.
No, madam; we can only take away from, we can add nothing to nature. Your servants clean your palace, but the architect built it. If your highness has eaten greedily, I can cleanse your entrails with cassia, manna, and pods of senna; it is a broom which I introduce to cleanse your inside. If you have a cancer, I must cut off your breast, but I cannot give you another. Have you a stone in your bladder? I can deliver you from it. I can cut off a gangrened foot, leaving you to walk on the other.
In a word, we physicians perfectly resemble teethdrawers, who extract a decayed tooth, without the power of substituting a sound one, quacks as they are.
PRINCESS.
You make me tremble; I believed that physicians cured all maladies.
PHYSICIAN.
We infallibly cure all those which cure themselves. It is generally, and with very few exceptions, with internal maladies as with external wounds. Nature alone cures those which are not mortal. Those which are so will find no resource in it.