The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [170]
“O thou eternal maker of all beings!”—he would cry, striking his breast with his right hand, (in case he had one)—“Thou whose power and goodness can enlarge the faculties of thy creatures to this infinite degree of excellence and perfection,—What have we Moonites3 done?”
CHAP. XXXIV
With two strokes, the one at Hippocrates, the other at Lord Verulam, did my father atchieve it.
The stroke at the prince of physicians, with which he began, was no more than a short insult upon his sorrowful complaint of the Ars longa,—and Vita brevis.1——Life short, cried my father,—and the art of healing tedious! And who are we to thank for both, the one and the other, but the ignorance of quacks themselves,—and the stage-loads2 of chymical nostrums, and peripatetic lumber, with which in all ages, they have first flatter’d the world, and at last deceived it.
——O my lord Verulam! cried my father, turning from Hippocrates, and making his second stroke at him, as the principal of nostrummongers, and the fittest to be made an example of to the rest,——What shall I say to thee, my great lord Verulam? What shall I say to thy internal spirit,—thy opium,—thy salt-petre,——thy greasy unctions,—thy daily purges,—thy nightly glisters, and succedaneums?3
——My father was never at a loss what to say to any man, upon any subject; and had the least occasion for the exordium of any man breathing: how he dealt with his lordship’s opinion,——you shall see;——but when—I know not:——we must first see what his lordship’s opinion was.
CHAP. XXXV
“The two great causes, which conspire with each other to shorten life, says lord Verulam, are first——
“The internal spirit, which like a gentle flame, wastes the body down to death:—And secondly, the external air, that parches the body up to ashes:—which two enemies attacking us on both sides of our bodies together, at length destroy our organs, and render them unfit to carry on the functions of life.”1
This being the state of the case; the road to Longevity was plain; nothing more being required, says his lordship, but to repair the waste committed by the internal spirit, by making the substance of it more thick and dense, by a regular course of opiates on one side, and by refrigerating the heat of it on the other, by three grains and a half of saltpetre every morning before you got up.——
Still this frame of ours was left exposed to the inimical assaults of the air without;—but this was fenced off again by a course of greasy unctions, which so fully saturated the pores of the skin, that no spicula2 could enter;——nor could any one get out.——This put a stop to all perspiration, sensible and insensible, which being the cause of so many scurvy distempers—a course of glisters was requisite to carry off redundant humours,—and render the system compleat.
What my father had to say to my lord of Verulam’s opiates, his saltpetre, and greasy unctions and glisters, you shall read,—but not to day—or to morrow: time presses upon me,—my reader is impatient—I must get forwards.——You shall read the chapter at your leisure, (if you chuse it) as soon as ever the Tristrapædia is published.——
Sufficeth it at present, to say, my father levelled the hypothesis with the ground, and in doing that, the learned know, he built up and established his own.——
CHAP. XXXVI
The whole secret of health, said my father, beginning the sentence again, depending evidently upon the due contention betwixt the radical heat and radical moisture within us;—the least imaginable skill had been sufficient to have maintained it, had not the school-men confounded the task, merely (as Van Helmont,1 the famous chymist, has proved) by all along mistaking the radical moisture for the tallow and fat of animal bodies.
Now the radical moisture is not the tallow or fat of animals, but an oily and balsamous