Books As Doctors: The Healing Properties of Articles And Books
Good Literature Now Takes The Place of Doctors for Thousands of People
'THE medicinal properties of books have long been known to the learned, and they are a favorite topic of old philosophers and students. That quaint old specialist on melancholy, Robert Burton, in his famous ‘‘ Anatomy of Melancholy,” extols reading as of all remedies the most efficacious. “ ’T is,” says he, ‘‘the best nepenthe, surest cordial, sweetest alterative, presentest diverter,” and he gathers together, in his quaint way, the testimonials of all manner of men, kings and saints and poets, telling us how Cardan calls a library “the medicine of the soul,” how Ferdinand and Alphonsus, kings of Aragon and Sicily, “were both cured by reading the history, one of Curtius, the other of Livy, when no prescribed medicine ” was of avail, and so on.
Good Literature now Takes the Place of Doctors for Thousands of People
The Scriptures, he compares to “‘an apothecary’s shop, wherein are remedies for all infirmities, purgatives, cordials, alteratives, corroboratives, lenitives;” this only being required, — “‘that the sick man take the potion which God has already tempered. " The medical efficacy of sacred writings, whether or not we regard the belief as superstitious, has been practically believed in and acted upon in all…
