Explore "An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician" by Robert Browning on Textopian.
Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician
Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs, / The not-incurious in God's handiwork / (This man's-flesh he hath admirably made, / Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste, / To coop up and keep down on earth a space / That puff of vapor from his mouth, man's soul) / -- To Abib, all-sagacious in our art, / Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast, / Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks / Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain, / Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip / Back and rejoin its source before the term, -- / And aptest in contrivance (under God) / To baffle it by deftly stopping such: -- / The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home / Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace) / Three samples of true snake-stone -- rarer still, / One of the other sort, the melon-shaped, / (But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs) / And writeth now the twenty-second time.