One lemma “Pingit et delectat” is not the author’s happiest effort. That attached to the only illustration of a man fishing—Tenet et tenetur—tersely depicts the happy angler.
Many instances illustrating the importance attached to fish, both in diet and in medicine, are to be found scattered through my pages. I would, however, wager that in addition to these multiplied even one thousandfold, there would yet remain in the pages of medical[705] and other writers (even if we stop as early as Aëtius) matter sufficient for a large Monograph.[706]
In one book alone of Pliny’s (XXXII.) fish are recommended as remedies, internal or external, no less than (according to my rough reckoning) 342 times!
If Hippocrates, “the father of Medicine,” in the fifth century b.c. (c. 460-359) laid the foundation, Galen some six centuries later (131-201 a.d.) crowned the edifice of that science. The cry and the practice of the former, “Back to Nature,” was energetically enjoined and brilliantly defended against the inevitable reactions of the Alexandrian and other schools by the latter, who acclaims his predecessor as “divine.”
In his insistent teaching “Ensue Health,” as the one and only thing alike for patients and physicians, Galen[707] might well have adopted the last line of Ariphron’s glorious pæan to Health:
μετὰ σεῖο, μάκαιρ’ Ὑγίεια, τέθαλε πάντα καὶ λάμπει Χαρίτων ἔαρι σέθεν δὲ χωρὶς οὔτις εὐδαίμων ἔφυ.
In his own case success crowned his efforts. He boldly boasts that he did not desire to be esteemed a physician, if from his twenty-eighth year to old age he had not lived in perfect health, except for some slight fevers, of which he soon rid himself.[708] Perhaps a secondary motive was not absent, viz. the desire to avoid the taunt so often levelled at medical men:
ἄλλων ἰατρὸς αὐτὸς ἔλκεσιν βρύεις,
which Urquhart in his Rabelais translates,
“He boasts of healing poor and rich, Yet is himself all over itch!”