Time & Perspective Quote by Matthew Prior

"Cured yesterday of my disease, I died last night of my physician"

Matthew Prior, Poet

About this Quote

A one-line epitaph that lands like a punchline: the patient survives the illness only to be killed by the cure. Prior’s couplet compresses an entire era’s anxiety about expertise into a neat, nasty paradox. “Cured yesterday” sets up the promise of resolution, the satisfying arc of recovery; “I died last night” snaps it shut. The real villain isn’t fate or frailty but the physician, a figure meant to embody salvation and ends up embodying risk.

The subtext is less anti-medicine than anti-certainty. Early modern medicine was a volatile mix of theory, tradition, and aggressive interventions: bleeding, purges, dubious compounds. To be “treated” could mean being weakened, poisoned, or simply exhausted by the regimen. Prior’s line turns that historical reality into moral satire: the professional who claims mastery over the body may be as dangerous as the ailment, because his authority invites trust at the exact moment skepticism is most necessary.

It also skewers status. Physicians in Prior’s England were climbing socially, trading on Latin, licensing, and the aura of learned control. The poem punctures that prestige with the oldest democratic weapon: gallows humor. Grammatically, the phrase “of my physician” is pointedly possessive; this is not medicine in the abstract, but your doctor, the one you hired, the one you believed. The joke curdles into blame, and that blame is the mechanism that makes the line endure: it dramatizes the fear that systems built to protect us can, in their confident competence, finish the job.

Quote Details

Topic	Witty One-Liners
Source	Verified source: Poems on Several Occasions (Matthew Prior, 1709) Text match: 100.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: Cured yesterday of my disease, I died last night of my physician.. The quote is a couplet from Matthew Prior’s short poem/epigram usually titled “The Remedy Worse than the Disease” (full opening: “I sent for Ratcliffe; was so ill,”). The earliest specific publication evidence I could locate quickly in a library catalog record is an authorized edition of Prior’s Poems on Several Occasions published in London for Jacob Tonson in 1709 (Morgan Library & Museum record). However, I was not able (in the time available here) to open a scanned 1709 copy and extract the page number where the poem appears, so the page is left null. For later printings where the poem’s page location is indexed: the Bodleian Digital Miscellanies Index records the poem in multiple later editions (e.g., an edition it labels [ECCO] ‘T75638’ at p.29, a 3rd ed. miscellany at p.33, etc.), but those are later than 1709 and the DMI itself is an index rather than the primary text. Use the 1709 Tonson authorized edition as the best candidate for “first published” in book form; to fully verify the first appearance and page, you would need to inspect the 1709 text (or any earlier separate printing, if one exists). Other candidates (1) Lyra Elegantiarum (Frederick Locker-Lampson, 1884) compilation95.0% ... Cured yesterday of my disease , I died last night of my physician . CLXIV . Matthew Prior . UNDERNEATH this sable...
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