ABSTRACT
Pliny the Elder (ad 23–79) commented on doctors when compiling his Natural History: ‘There is no doubt that all these, in their hunt for popularity by means of some new gimmick, trafficked for it with our lives. This is the cause of those wretched, quarrelsome consultations at the bedside of the patients, when no doctor agrees with another, in case he may appear to acknowledge a superior. This is also the cause of that unfortunate epitaph on a tomb: ‘He died from an overdose of doctors’. Medicine changes every day, again and again it is revamped, and we are swept along on the puffings of the best brains of Greece. It is obvious that anyone among them, who acquires the power of speaking, immediately assumes supreme control over our life and death, just as if thousands of people do not in fact live without doctors, though not without medicine, as the Roman people have done for more than six hundred years. The Roman people themselves were not slow in welcoming science—indeed, they were even greedy for medicine—until they tried it, and condemned it.’
