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Life's Pleasures Quote by Thomas Sydenham

"The arrival of a good clown exercises a more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than of twenty asses laden with drugs"

About this Quote

Sydenham’s line lands like a physician’s wink: medicine can be indispensable, but the culture of medicine is often overconfident, overstocked, and blind to what actually restores people. By pitting “a good clown” against “twenty asses laden with drugs,” he doesn’t merely praise laughter; he ridicules the era’s habit of equating treatment with inventory. The image is intentionally low-comic and physical: pack animals trudging in with pharmacological cargo, a traveling fool arriving with nothing but timing. The joke sharpens the argument. If health is treated as a supply problem, you miss that morale, social cohesion, and relief from stress can move the needle in ways a pharmacopoeia can’t.

The subtext is Sydenham’s larger insurgency against showy, intervention-heavy medicine. As a leading empiricist of his day, he was skeptical of baroque cures and bloodletting theater. The “asses” aren’t just animals; they’re a stand-in for practitioners who mistake busyness for efficacy, and for patients who want a transaction more than a recovery. “Beneficial influence upon the health of a town” scales the claim from the body to the civic. A clown is public health by other means: a shared event that loosens fear, breaks isolation, and reminds a community it’s still alive.

It’s also a quiet warning to today’s pharmaceutical mindset: when care becomes a logistics chain, humor and human connection look optional. Sydenham insists they’re clinical.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
Source
Later attribution: Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine - ... (Marc S. Micozzi, 2014) modern compilationISBN: 9780323298940 · ID: t7HSBQAAQBAJ
Text match: 97.08%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
... The arrival of a good clown exercises a more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than of twenty asses laden with drugs . -Thomas Sydenham , MD ( seventeenth - century English physician ) The first two sections of the book ...
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Sydenham, Thomas. (2026, February 9). The arrival of a good clown exercises a more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than of twenty asses laden with drugs. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-arrival-of-a-good-clown-exercises-a-more-72420/

Chicago Style
Sydenham, Thomas. "The arrival of a good clown exercises a more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than of twenty asses laden with drugs." FixQuotes. February 9, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-arrival-of-a-good-clown-exercises-a-more-72420/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The arrival of a good clown exercises a more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than of twenty asses laden with drugs." FixQuotes, 9 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-arrival-of-a-good-clown-exercises-a-more-72420/. Accessed 24 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Thomas Sydenham (September 10, 1624 - December 29, 1689) was a Scientist from England.

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