Oranges and Lemons
Author: Julio Romero de Torres
“Don’t he?” replied the doctor. “Well, step up here, Dick, and let me see your tongue. No, I should be surprised if he did! The man’s tongue is fit to frighten the French. Another fever.”
“Ah, there,” said Morgan, “that comed of sp’iling Bibles.”
“That comes—as you call it—of being arrant asses,” retorted the doctor, “and not having sense enough to know honest air from poison, and the dry land from a vile, pestiferous slough. I think it most probable—though of course it’s only an opinion—that you’ll all have the deuce to pay before you get that malaria out of your systems. Camp in a bog, would you? Silver, I’m surprised at you. You’re less of a fool than many, take you all round; but you don’t appear to me to have the rudiments of a notion of the rules of health.
“Well,” he added after he had dosed them round and they had taken his prescriptions, with really laughable humility, more like charity schoolchildren than blood-guilty mutineers and pirates—“well, that’s done for today.”
From “Treasure Island” by Stevenson, Robert Louis
Can you imagine being a doctor and taking care of pirates? A physician for many years, I have probably come across more than one pirate. Obviously, these guys did not have wooden legs, eye patches, or a parrot on their shoulders, but they were guilty of as much piracy as the characters described by Stevenson in this classic novel. But patients are patients, and sickness changes all of us into harmless lambs: “Well,” he added after he had dosed them round and they had taken his prescriptions, with really laughable humility, more like charity schoolchildren than blood-guilty mutineers and pirates—“well, that’s done for today.”
Rules of health have existed since the inception of medicine. In the early Twelfth Century, the famous physician Moses Maimonides wrote: “The man who takes care of himself as meticulously as the horse he rides will be free of many bad illnesses. You will not find a man who feeds an excessive amount of hay to his animal, but rather he will measure the serving depending on its need. Yet, he will eat too much without giving it a second thought. He will also mete out the exercise to his animal so that it stays healthy. But the owner will not do the same with his own body although he knows about the importance of exercise for keeping his health and preventing diseases …”
