I think then, as I said before, that sick men cannot better place themselves anywhere in more safety, than in sitting still in that course of life wherein they have been bred and trained up; change, be it what it will, distempers and puts one out.  Do you believe that chestnuts can hurt a Perigordin or a Lucchese, or milk and cheese the mountain people?  We enjoin them not only a new, but a contrary, method of life; a change that the healthful cannot endure.  Prescribe water to a Breton of threescore and ten; shut a seaman up in a stove; forbid a Basque footman to walk:  you will deprive them of motion, and in the end of air and light: 

              “An vivere tanti est? 
               Cogimur a suetis animum suspendere rebus,
               Atque, ut vivamus, vivere desinimus. . 
               Hos superesse reor, quibus et spirabilis aer
               Et lux, qua regimur, redditur ipsa gravis.”

["Is life worth so much?  We are compelled to withhold the mind from things to which we are accustomed; and, that we may live, we cease to live . . . .  Do I conceive that they still live, to whom the respirable air, and the light itself, by which we are governed, is rendered oppressive?” —­Pseudo-Gallus, Eclog., i. 155, 247.]

If they do no other good, they do this at least, that they prepare patients betimes for death, by little and little undermining and cutting off the use of life.

Both well and sick, I have ever willingly suffered myself to obey the appetites that pressed upon me.  I give great rein to my desires and propensities; I do not love to cure one disease by another; I hate remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself.  To be subject to the colic and subject to abstain from eating oysters are two evils instead of one; the disease torments us on the one side, and the remedy on the other.  Since we are ever in danger of mistaking, let us rather run the hazard of a mistake, after we have had the pleasure.  The world proceeds quite the other way, and thinks nothing profitable that is not painful; it has great suspicion of facility.  My appetite, in various things, has of its own accord happily enough accommodated itself to the health of my stomach.  Relish and pungency in sauces were pleasant to me when young; my stomach disliking them since, my taste incontinently followed.  Wine is hurtful to sick people, and ’tis the first thing that my mouth then finds distasteful, and with an invincible dislike.  Whatever I take against my liking does me harm; and nothing hurts me that I eat with appetite and delight.  I never received harm by any action that was very pleasant to me; and accordingly have made all medicinal conclusions largely give way to my pleasure; and I have, when I was young,

         “Quem circumcursans huc atque huc saepe Cupido
          Fulgebat crocink splendidus in tunic.”

["When Cupid, fluttering round me here and there, shone in his rich
purple mantle.”—­Catullus, lxvi. 133.]