Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought,
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.
The wise, for cure, on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend.

These lines are Dryden’s verse reflection on health and medicine in late seventeenth-century England, when professional medical treatment often meant purges, emetics, and bitter “draughts” derived from Galenic humoral theory. Dryden contrasts such paid interventions with the restorative value of outdoor activity—here figured as hunting in open fields—an aristocratic pastime also associated with vigor and fresh air. The couplets belong to a longer satiric-moral passage in which he commends moderation and “exercise” as the prudent person’s preventative regimen, and he closes with a providential claim that nature (God’s workmanship) is fundamentally sound and not easily improved by human tinkering.

In these lines, the speaker contrasts “health unbought” gained through outdoor activity with the paid interventions of physicians and their unpleasant medicines (“a nauseous draught”). The couplets praise exercise and an active life as the wiser, more natural route to recovery, implying that the body—“God’s work”—possesses an inherent order that should not be overmanaged by human artifice. The final maxim, “God never made his work for man to mend,” expresses a providential skepticism toward medical tinkering and a preference for trusting nature. Read broadly, the passage participates in an early modern moralizing tradition that links physical vigor, moderation, and rural pursuits with virtue, while casting professional medicine as costly, intrusive, and sometimes harmful.