Meaning & Analysis
Patience serves as a universal remedy, soothing and alleviating all types of suffering or difficulty, just as a plaster covers and heals every physical sore.
Insights
Universal Solace
The proverb suggests that patience can bring comfort and healing to a wide range of hardships—physical, emotional, or spiritual. It implies that enduring difficulties with calm acceptance can itself be a source of relief and eventual resolution.
Psychological Resilience
Patience is framed as an internal strength or medicine for coping with adversity, stress, and disappointment. It underscores the restorative power of waiting, enduring, and refraining from rash reaction, proposing that emotional fortitude helps one outlast suffering.
Acceptance and Suffering
This reading interprets patience as a kind of active acceptance: by not struggling against pain or misfortune, one lessens its sting. It advocates a philosophical approach to life’s inevitable wounds, transforming passive endurance into a virtue.
Historical Symbolism
Historically, plasters (or salves) were the most accessible medical remedy, representing a simple, almost magical cure-all in popular imagination. By likening patience to a plaster, the proverb draws on the tangible, everyday symbolism of folk medicine and healing rituals, making a psychological trait as comforting and accessible as a household remedy.
Cultural and Literary Resonance
This metaphor appears repeatedly in early modern English literature, from Brooke to Wilson, and is echoed in many languages and cultures. The commonality of plasters as a metaphor for healing wounds links this proverb to broader themes of mercy, divine providence, and emotional endurance found in world folklore and wisdom literature.
Psychological Truth
The proverb captures a core psychological insight: while suffering is unavoidable, the way it is endured—through patience—can mitigate its emotional harm. It tacitly acknowledges that most wounds, except death, are lessened or made bearable by attitude and time.
Implicit Bias Toward Endurance
Embedded within is a cultural bias that valorizes endurance and restraint, sometimes at the expense of action or protest. This has both empowering and problematic dimensions, as it can both encourage resilience and justify passive acceptance of injustice or pain.
Rhetorical Devices
Metaphor
The central metaphor equates 'patience' with a 'plaster,' vividly personifying an abstract virtue as a tangible object of healing and care.
Synecdoche
By referencing 'sores'—a part representing the whole of human suffering—the proverb generalizes the reach of patience, making the advice applicable to all manner of wounds, literal or figurative.
Alliteration
The repeated 'p' sound in 'patience' and 'plaster' creates a gentle, soothing rhythm, mirroring the calming effect the proverb seeks to convey.
Transcription
Quotations
Pacience is a remedie for euery disease.
A sondry medson hath, eche sondry faynt disease, But patience, a common salve, to every wound geves ease.
Pacience is the best medicine that is, for a sicke man, the most precious plaister that is, for any wounde.
(for all paine).
The Roote of Patience is Phisicke for all Sores.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
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