But as a matter of fact the public itself was no less careful to guard the secret, as we gather from _Martial_,[278] as well as from the fact that _Galen_ felt himself constrained even in his day to compose a special Treatise on dissimulated diseases. This sort of intentional deception on the part of patients was so much the easier, as Physicians in those times, as said above, in virtue of their pathological views,—some of which indeed may very well have originated in this way,—were little accessible to the truth. For these reasons they deserved, at any rate to some degree, the satiric lash of Martial; and were very generally ridiculed by the more discerning of the laity. This comes out in the important words of _Appuleius_ (Metamorph. X. 211.) as follows: “Crederes et illam fluctuare tantum vaporibus febrium: nisi quod et flebat: _Heu medicorum ignavae mentes!_ Quid venae pulsus, quid caloris intemperantia, quid fatigatus anhelitus et utrimque secus iactatae crebriter laterum mutuae vicissitudines? _Dii boni! Quam facilis, licet non artifici medico, cuivis tamen docto venereae cupidinis comprehensio_, cum videas aliquem sine corporis calore flagrantem.” (Could you imagine her so tempest-tossed by the vapours of mere fever,—not to mention that she kept forever crying: “_Oh! the sorry wits of doctors!_” What means the throbbing vein, the excessive temperature, the labouring breath, and the hurried interchange of heaving flank, panting now on one side now on the other? _Great heavens! how easy the diagnosis, not of course for a medical expert, but for any one learned in the symptoms of love_, when you see a person burning, yet without bodily fever-heat). But does all this justify us in casting a stone at our medical colleagues of Ancient times? For the last three hundred years we imagine ourselves clearly acquainted with Venereal disease and all its forms; yet how many a bubo has been mistaken for a strangulated hernia, anal callosity, or the like, how many a case of vaginal gonorrhœa for simple _fluor albus_ (white discharge, leucorrhœa), how many a condyloma on the posteriors for hæmorrhoidal swellings, and accordingly not treated as the physician in _Juvenal_, _medico ridente_ (the physician grinning the while), treated them,—that is duly cut away or ligatured?