There are at present thousands of medical practitioners, whose only
merit is and ever will be, that they have succeeded in passing an
examination and obtaining the title M.D.; but the title “doctor”
means merely an academical degree; the diploma merely certifies that
the examiners believe the student to have fulfilled all that the
regulations require, and although such a title may involve the right to
poison and kill without being punished for it, the conferring of such
a degree does not constitute a physician. The true physician as well
as the real priest is ordained by God. Paracelsus says in substance as
follows:—
“He who can cure disease is a physician. Neither emperors nor popes,
neither colleges nor high schools can create physicians. They can
confer privileges and cause a person who is not a physician to
appear as if he were one; they can give him permission to kill,
but they cannot give him the power to cure; they cannot make him a
real physician if he has not already been ordained by God. The true
physician does not brag about his cleverness or praise his medicines
or seek to monopolize the right of robbing the patient; for he knows
that the work must praise the master, and not the master the work.
There is a knowledge which is derived from man, and another knowledge
which is derived from God through the light of nature. He who has not
been born to be a physician will never succeed. A physician should
be faithful and charitable. He who loves only himself and his own
pocket will be of little benefit to the sick. Medicine is much more
an art than a science. To know the experience of others is useful
to a physician; but all the learning of books cannot make a man a
physician, unless he is one by nature. Medical wisdom is only given by
God.” (Comp. “Paragranum,” i. 4.)
This virtue which constitutes the true physician cannot be created by
colleges, nor can it be conferred by anyone personally upon himself.
No one can confer upon himself a thing which he does not possess, or
without the aid of any higher influence make himself better than
that which he is; because, as has been explained above, the power
exercised by any form is not the creation of the form, but an eternal
principle, entering into objective existence in forms and becoming
manifested in and through them by its own power. Neither truth nor
wisdom can be manufactured; they exist independently of all opinions,
observations, speculation, and logic; they may be hidden from our
sight like the sun on a rainy day; but as the sun is independent of
our being aware of his presence, so the truth exists eternally whether
or not it is acknowledged by us. If the whole generation of mankind at
present walking this earth should turn into idiots, the truth would not
therefore cease to be, but would become manifested again as wisdom in a
more enlightened age.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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