Aspiration is to be of a generous soul, of a spirit eager for science.
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| Esculapio |
Do you wish for men to have you as a God who alleviates their
evils and drive away their terrors? Have you thought well of what
is to be your life?
The majority of the town folk can, finished their task, isolate
themselves far from the inopportune ones; your door will be
always open to all; they will come to disturb your dreams, your
pleasures, your meditation; no longer will you be independent.
The poor, accustomed to suffering, will not call on you but in
case of emergency; but the rich ones will treat you like a slave in
charge to remedy their excesses; be it because they have an
indigestion, be it because they have caught a cold, they are
quick to wake you up at the slightest restlessness; you will have
to show interest for the most vulgar details of their existence, to
decide if they are to eat lamb or sheep, if there are to walk in this
or that way. You will not be able to be absent, nor to be ill. You
will have to be always ready to attend as soon as your master
calls.
You have faith that your work will get you a reputation?
Remember that they will judge you not for your science, but by
the casualties of destiny, the cut of your clothing, the appearance
of your house, the number of your servants, the attention which
you dedicate to gossip and by the tastes of your customers.
Some will believe in you if you don’t come from Asia; others if
you believe in the Gods; others if you do not believe in them.
Your neighbor the butcher, the shopkeeper, the shoemaker, will
not trust his customers to you if you are not his client; the
herbalist will not praise you, unless you prescribe their herbs. You
will have to fight against the superstitions of the ignorant.
You like simplicity? You will have to adopt the attitude of augur.
Are you active? Do you know the value of time? You cannot
show annoyance or impatience; you will have to listen to stories
from the beginning of times to explain a colic.
You feel passion for the truth? No longer will you be able to
speak it. You will have to hide from some the gravity of their
problem, from others its insignificance, because it would bother
them. You will have to hide secrets that you own, seeming to
appear deceived, ignorant, accomplice.
You will never be permitted to doubt: if you do not affirm that you
know the nature of the disease, that you own an infallible remedy
to cure it, the common people will go quickly to the
gossipmongers and sell the lies that they need.
Don’t count on graciousness: when the patient is healed, the
cure is due to his robustness; if he dies, it is you who have killed
him. While he is in danger he treats you like a God, he begs,
makes promises, and overwhelms you with flattery; no sooner is
he in convalescence already you hinder him; when one is to pay
the cares that you have lavished on him, one gets upset and
denigrates you.
I pity you if you are attracted to beauty: you will see the ugliest
and most repugnant that is present in the human specie; all your
senses will be mistreated. You will have to stick your ears against
the sweat of dirty chests, to breathe the scent of miserable
houses, cheap perfumes of the courtesans, to feel tumors, to
cure sores green with pus, to contemplate urine, to investigate
the belches, to fix your gaze and olfactory to rubbish, to put your
finger in many orifices. They will call you for a man who, bothered
by belly pains, will display a nauseating chamber pot, saying with
satisfaction “thanks to the fact that I have had the precaution of
not throwing it”. Remember then that you will have to appear
interested in such.
Your Title will be for you a tunic of Nero: in the street, in the
banquets, the theater, in your own bed, strangers, friends, your
close friends will speak of their problems and ask for a remedy.
The world will seem to you a vast hospital, an assembly of
individuals who complain. Your life will pass in the shade of
death, between the pains of bodies and that of souls, the
sufferings and the hypocrisy that calculates the head of the dying
ones.
You will find yourself alone in your sadness, alone in your studies,
alone in the middle of human egoism. When at the cost of great
effort you have prolonged the existence of some old ones or a
deformed child, a war will come that will destroy the healthiest
and most robust of the city. Therefore you will be in charge of
separating the weak from the strong to save the weak and send
the strong to their death.
Think carefully while you have time. But if, indifferent to the
fortune, the pleasures, the ingratitude; if knowing that you will be
alone among fierce humans, you have a soul stoic enough to be
satisfied with work accomplished without illusions; if you judge
yourself paid enough with the happiness of a mother, with a face
that smiles because it no longer suffers, with the hidden face of
the dying from whom you have hidden the arrival of death: if you
are anxious to know man, to penetrate all the tragedies of your
destiny, then BE A DOCTOR, MY SON.
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