4. The Curability and Incurability of Diseases in Relation to Karma

We find a time at the turning point between the Middle Ages and modern times, about the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, when the idea gradually gained ground that forms of disease could be strictly limited, and that for every disease there was some sort of herb or mixture by which the disease in question could be cured. This belief lasted for a long time, even into the nineteenth century, and when we as laymen, or as those who have accepted the ideas of the present day, read of the treatment of disease from the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth centuries and for some time later, we are astonished at the remedies and recipes which were largely used at that time: teas, mixtures, more dangerous medicines, blood-letting, etc.