When young children cry lustily, they grow well and rapidly, for through crying, the members and veins are stretched out, which have no other exercise. Where Christ intimates that sin was the cause of the palsy, and of every sickness. Experience has proved the toad to be endowed with valuable qualities. If you run a stick through three toads, and, after having dried them in the sun, apply them to any pestilent tumor, they draw out all the poison, and the malady will disappear.
Sleep is a most useful and most salutary operation of nature.
Scarcely any minor annoyance angers me more than the being suddenly awakened out of a pleasant slumber. I understand that in Italy they torture poor people by depriving them of sleep. The physicians in sickness consider only of what natural causes the malady preceeds, and this they cure, or not, with their physic. But they see not that often the devil casts a sickness upon one without any natural causes. When I was ill at Schmalcalden, the physicians made me take as much medicine as though I had been a great bull.