29.14. 14. That we must not separate the Laws from the Circumstances in
which they were made.
It was decreed by a law at Athens that when the
city was besieged, all the useless people should be put to death.
[23]
This was an abominable political law, in consequence of an abominable
law of nations. Among the Greeks, the inhabitants of a town taken lost
their civil liberty and were sold as slaves. The taking of a town
implied its entire destruction, which is the source not only of those
obstinate defences, and of those unnatural actions, but likewise of
those shocking laws which they sometimes enacted.
The Roman laws ordained that physicians should be punished for
neglect or unskilfulness.
[24]
In those cases, if the physician was a
person of any fortune or rank, he was only condemned to deportation, but
if he was of a low condition he was put to death. By our institutions it
is otherwise. The Roman laws were not made under the same circumstances
as ours: at Rome every ignorant pretender intermeddled with physic; but
among us, physicians are obliged to go through a regular course of
study, and to take their degrees, for which reason they are supposed to
understand their profession.
Footnotes
[24]
The Cornelian law De Sicariis, "Institutes," lib. iv, tit. 3, de lege
Aquilia, section 7.
