The art of living long : a new and improved English version of the treatise / by the celebrated Venetian centenarian Louis Cornaro, with essays by Joseph Addison, Lord Bacon, and Sir William Temple.

  • Luigi Cornaro
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The art of living long : a new and improved English version of the treatise / by the celebrated Venetian centenarian Louis Cornaro, with essays by Joseph Addison, Lord Bacon, and Sir William Temple. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    monly considered a heating spice, would not act upon me as such, but that cinnamon would warm and help me ? What physician could have informed me of these two hidden qualities of my nature; since I myself, after a long course of observation, have barely been able to note and find them? Therefore, I say again, from all these reasons it follows that it is impossible for anyone to be a perfect physician of another. Since, then, a man can have no better doctor than himself, and no better medicine than the temperate life, he should by all means embrace that life. I do not mean to say, however, that in the knowledge and treatment of the diseases incurred by those who do not lead orderly lives, there is no need of the physician, or that he should not be valued highly. For, if a friend brings comfort when he comes to us in time of sickness, —though his visit be merely to manifest sympathy in our suffering and to encourage us to hope for recovery,— how much the more ought we to appreciate the physician who is a friend visiting us that he may be of service, and who promises to restore our health? Yet, when it comes to a question of preserving health, my opinion is that we should take, as our proper physician, the regular and temperate life. For, as we have seen, it is the true medicine of nature and best suited to man; it keeps him in health, even though he be of an unfortunate constitu- tion; it enables him to retain his strength to the age of a hundred years or more ; and, finally, it does not suffer him to pass away through sickness or by any alteration of the humors, but simply by the coming to an end of the radical moisture, which is exhausted at the last. Learned men have often asserted that similar effects could be obtained by means of drinkable gold or the [58]
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