To advertise their skill practitioners of this class will often set bones and perform minor operations before a gaping crowd just outside in the streets--actions denounced by men of Symmachus’s caliber; and all their patients are examined with great publicity. Lower still are the itinerant quacks who will diagnose diseases on a street corner and vend alleged theriac and other “medicines” from a pedlar’s pack. There are other unlovely members of the profession who grow rich by performing criminal operations, and to whom unfaithful wives or legacy-seekers can appeal, begging them to “put the patient out of his misery!”--with results deliberately murderous. More legitimate of course are the numerous women who attend to the maladies of their own sex. Some of these women are said to be physicians of high capacity and able to command generous compensation. A serious handicap to medicine exists because there are no public hospitals in Rome, although sick strangers are probably allowed to lie around the Temples of Asculapius or of other healing deities.[86] The control of epidemics is very imperfect. Rome has been visited severely by the plague, and in the reign of Marcus Aurelius it will be ravaged yet again. The age is a brutal one. Much is done to keep the populace amused and to delight the eye; relatively little to preserve precious human lives. In the great slave familia, however, self-interest if no better motive impels the owners to try to keep their chattels healthy. As already explained nearly every slave household has its special slave physicians, men of tolerable competence; and there is also the _valetudinarium_, the infirmary--a detached building or a large room in which sick slaves can be properly tended, and also isolated to prevent infection. =146. Suicide as Escape from Hopeless Disease.=--Symmachus, despite his reputation for “wonderful cures,” has just lost a wealthy patient. The circumstances were somewhat unusual but by no means unprecedented. Quintus Gordianus, an elderly senator, had been suffering from a very painful internal disease. Symmachus assured him the case was incurable, but that he might, nevertheless, live for years. Thereupon Gordianus announced that he would commit suicide. The right of a sane man voluntarily to surrender his life is undoubted. Philosophers have written fine essays on the desirability of suicide; only it must be entered upon discreetly and not as a cowardly means of escaping the duties of life. Many of Nero’s and Domitian’s noble victims obviously obeyed the mandate “Open your veins” more because they were tired of existence than because a desperate attempt to overthrow the tyrant would have been hopeless. Many a Roman aristocrat has sucked all the sensual pleasure so completely out of life that the latter has become one great boredom, and no religion commands “Live on!” when it is evident that the remainder of existence must merely be months or years of helplessness and pain.