BENEFICENCE

For Erasmus, the “moral excellence” of medicine consists chiefly in its dedication to “saving human life” (page 49). Although the physician also has a “duty to benefit men in other ways” (page 42) which are enumerated throughout the Oration, nevertheless it is in saving lives that “the physician's beneficence approximate[s] to the divine charity” (page 41). “In times of peril” the good physician remains at the patient's bedside “to contend with the disease for the life of the critically ill, and thereby frequently puts his own life at risk” (page 46). He is in this way a “much more genuine friend” than “the common run of friends” who “in times of adversity ... fly away, like swallows at the approach of winter” (page 46). As we shall see below, this invocation of friendship is important for Erasmus's account of the patient's obligations as well as the physician's.