Here again I am tempted to cry woe upon these foolish doctors whose consciences are seared with a hot iron, who do not care in the least for their patients, and will be called to a terrible account for their criminal folly on the day of judgment. Then they will behold Him whom they have pierced by neglecting their neighbour's welfare, while pocketing his money, and will see at last that they ought to have laboured night and day, in order to acquire greater skill in the healing of disease. Instead of this they complacently go on trusting to chance, prescribing the first medicine they happen to find in their books, and leaving the patient and the disease to fight it out as best they can. They do not even trouble to enquire in what way the medicines they prescribe are prepared. Their laboratory, their furnace, their drugs are at the Apothecary's, to whom they rarely or never go. They inscribe upon a sheet of paper, under the magic word "Recipe," the names of certain medicines, whereupon the Apothecary's assistant takes his mortar and pounds out of the wretched patient whatever health may still be left in him.
Change these evil times, oh. God! Cut down these trees, lest they grow up to the sky! Overthrow these overweening giants, lest they pile mountain upon mountain and attempt to storm heaven! Protect the conscientious few who quietly strive to discover the mysteries of Thy creation!
Wow! If written in today's English, it would be spot on for what is going on today! Pretty amazing that the medical field was suspect even that many centuries ago.
Not really odd at all. Doctors have always been suspected. In fact, there are many examples of kings who consulted doctors for whatever ailment they had and executed the guy for not curing them fast enough, whether the disease was curable or not. If you read old medical literature, they typically referenced Galen's four humors or what was effectively folk medicine. Homeopathy today is absolutely no better today. They offer "treatments" of things which are said to have similar characteristics to the thing they're alleged to treat. Frankly, I think a lot of what they did was entirely based on chance, and we didn't honestly see much of any improvement until the "Age of reason" and the advent of the scientific method.
What's going on today is a far cry from the medieval medicine of this monk's era. Most of that was born out of ignorance. I think much of what we see today is born out of patient's own laziness. They refuse to do the work of healthy living: diet, exercise, sleep properly, manage your stress, get appropriate sunlight and vitamin D. We sit all day. We snack all day. We eat garbage and far too much of it. And then we get all of these chronic diseases of an unhealthy lifestyle, and the doctor tells the patient they need to live healthier, but knowing they won't change because change is hard, he gives them a pill to take every day for the rest of his natural life. And our apothecary, Big Pharma, loves it because that means an endless revenue stream. So we get blood pressure pills, and statins, and diabetes medicines, and all this other stuff that doesn't actually cure the disease (because the cure is a healthy lifestyle), but which we take to try and delay the inevitable heart attack or stroke.
It's not every disease of course. Antibiotics are highly effective for curing bacterial infections for example, so we need to be nuanced in this discussion, but yeah, the industry responds to stimuli, but we have a lot of people making livings off of the $3.3T we spend every year on healthcare and it creates perverse incentives.
My wife goes to a "health care" professional who dabbles with homeopathy. The notion that the more dilute the "medicine" is, the stronger it is, is so ridiculous! I told my wife to just drink a drop of tap water every day, because it is essentially the most dilute medicine you could take, since there is probably a few atoms of every non-radioactive element in each drop :) (my wife wasn't too happy for me to call out the homeopathic nonsense :) ) I have been saying for years that medical doctors can't cure ANY disease, they only treat diseases (and infections aren't diseases). Medical doctors are trade-school graduates, who have been put on a largely un-deserved pedestal by society, and seem to have arrogance drilled into them by the medical schools.
The English here is surely a translation of the original Latin or German.