They learn their trade at our expense, they make some progress in the art of curing; and they alone are permitted to murder with impunity.' Holy father! consider as your enemies the crowd of physicians who beset you.
It is in our age that we behold verified the prediction of the elder Cato, who declared that corruption would be general when the Greeks should have transmitted the sciences to Rome, and, above all, the science of healing.

Whole nations have done without this art.

The Roman republic, according to Pliny, was without physicians for six hundred years, and was never in a more flourishing condition." The Pope, a poor dying old man, communicated Petrarch's letter immediately to his physicians, and it kindled in the whole faculty a flame of indignation, worthy of being described by Moliere.

Petrarch made a general enemy of the physicians, though, of course, the weakest and the worst of them were the first to attack him.

One of them told him, "You are a foolhardy man, who, contemning the physicians, have no fear either of the fever or of the malaria." Petrarch replied, "I certainly have no assurance of being free from the attacks of either; but, if I were attacked by either, I should not think of calling in physicians." His first assailant was one of Clement's own physicians, who loaded him with scurrility in a formal letter.