(5) In the consideration of the cures of diseases, I find a
deficience in the receipts of propriety, respecting the particular
cures of diseases: for the physicians have frustrated the fruit of
tradition and experience by their magistralities, in adding and
taking out and changing quid pro qua in their receipts, at their
pleasures; commanding so over the medicine, as the medicine cannot
command over the disease. For except it be treacle and mithridatum,
and of late diascordium, and a few more, they tie themselves to no
receipts severely and religiously. For as to the confections of
sale which are in the shops, they are for readiness and not for
propriety. For they are upon general intentions of purging,
opening, comforting, altering, and not much appropriate to
particular diseases. And this is the cause why empirics and old
women are more happy many times in their cures than learned
physicians, because they are more religious in holding their
medicines. Therefore here is the deficience which I find, that
physicians have not, partly out of their own practice, partly out of
the constant probations reported in books, and partly out of the
traditions of empirics, set down and delivered over certain
experimental medicines for the cure of particular diseases, besides
their own conjectural and magistral descriptions.
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