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Daily Inspiration Quote by John Fletcher

"I find the medicine worse than the malady"

About this Quote

A complaint dressed as a verdict, "I find the medicine worse than the malady" has the snap of courtroom language and the bite of lived experience. Fletcher, writing for a Jacobean stage that loved reversals and moral traps, uses the familiar Renaissance metaphor of the body politic and the body literal: cures, purges, bloodletting. The line lands because the audience already suspects what it claims - that respectable remedies can be thinly veiled violence.

The specific intent is not simply to reject help, but to indict the kind of help on offer: interventions that preserve authority more than they relieve pain. In Fletcher's world, "medicine" can mean punishment, forced marriage, social correction, religious discipline - any institutional fix that arrives with a sermon and leaves a bruise. The phrasing is coolly empirical ("I find"), as if the speaker has run the experiment and is reporting results. That little posture of reason matters: it lets the character sound sane while accusing the system of sanctioned cruelty.

Subtextually, the line flatters the audience's cynicism. It invites them to recognize a pattern: the supposed cure often demands confession, compliance, or sacrifice disproportionate to the original problem. It's also a playwright's wink about drama itself. Tragedy and comedy both thrive on misapplied solutions - the well-meant scheme that escalates chaos - and Fletcher is bottling that mechanism in a sentence.

In context, early modern medicine was invasive and precarious; treatment could kill. The quote borrows that real fear to sharpen a broader skepticism: when power insists it's acting "for your own good", you should check the dosage.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Fletcher, John. (2026, January 15). I find the medicine worse than the malady. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-find-the-medicine-worse-than-the-malady-79672/

Chicago Style
Fletcher, John. "I find the medicine worse than the malady." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-find-the-medicine-worse-than-the-malady-79672/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I find the medicine worse than the malady." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-find-the-medicine-worse-than-the-malady-79672/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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John Fletcher (December 20, 1579 - 1625 AC) was a Dramatist from England.

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