Endpiece: Common doctors

When I say “common doctors” I mean those whom we can also call “textbook” doctors, since indeed they have their whole medicine not in their heart and mind but laid aside in books and manuscripts; and they do not know how to apply their hands to the curing of a disease unless, having first found its name, they look for the remedies under that appropriate to it in their books. Whereas true doctors, inasmuch as they prosecute their art by methods having but scant regard for names, investigate the substance and causes of diseases by division and resolution in order to elicit therefrom therapeutic indications and frame intentions by which they have recourse to books; they do not, as do the former, allow themselves to be led like blind men by names to them as judges, but putting what they read to the refinement of reason they do not obey writings as though they were masters, but rather drag the writings themselves like slaves toward the forwarding of their own purpose: the result is that this exact knowledge of names is necessary for both schools; for the former because they know no other way of healing; for the latter to enable them to enter into discussion with others and to dispute with them the method of effecting a cure. Giovanni Manardi, Concerning the names of disease afflicting the outward parts (1535), quoted in Bullough VL. Universities, medicine and science in the medieval west. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004:97