Law — First Draft Translation

LAW 1 Medicine is the most distinguished of all the crafts. Yet through the ignorance of those who practise it, and of those who casually pass judgment on such practitioners, it falls far behind all the other crafts as things now stand. The error in this matter seems to me to have chiefly the following cause: in the cities no penalty has been fixed for medicine alone except ill-repute, and ill-repute does not wound those who are composed of it. Men of this kind are most like the figures brought on stage in tragedies: for just as those figures have the costume, robe, and mask of an actor but are not actors, so too with physicians — many in name, but in deed utterly few. 2 For whoever intends to grasp firmly the understanding of medicine must come into possession of the following: natural endowment; instruction; a place that is well-suited; learning from childhood; love of hard work; time. First of all, then, natural endowment is required. For when nature works against one, everything is empty; when nature leads toward what is best, instruction in the craft becomes possible. One must acquire this instruction with practical wisdom, having become a learner from childhood in a place that will be well-suited to learning; and beyond that, love of hard work must be brought to bear over a long time, so that learning, once rooted in one's nature, may bear its fruits ably and in full vigour. 3 For as the study of things that grow in the earth is, so too is the learning of medicine. Our nature is like the soil; the teachings of those who instruct are like the seeds; learning from childhood is like the falling of the seeds into the ploughed field in due season; the place in which learning occurs is like the nourishment that comes from the surrounding air to the growing things; love of hard work is the working of the soil; and time strengthens all these things, so that they are fully brought to maturity. 4 Those who have brought these things to the craft of medicine, and have taken accurate knowledge of it, should thus, as they travel through the cities, be recognised as physicians not in word only, but in deed as well. Inexperience is a bad treasury and a bad possession for those who have it — both in dream and in waking — lacking all share in good spirit and cheerfulness, and a nurse of cowardice and recklessness. For cowardice signals incapacity, and recklessness signals lack of craft. There are two things: knowledge and opinion — of these, the one produces knowing, the other ignorance. 5 Things that are sacred are revealed to sacred persons; to the uninitiated it is not lawful, until they have been initiated in the rites of knowledge.