Questions are not infrequently asked about the meaning of the motto displayed on the College Arms (see Figure 1). When a translation is offered – usually along the lines of ‘It is forbidden to be cruel’ – there is often puzzlement about why a College of Physicians should have chosen such a phrase to embody its aims and aspirations. In this essay I discuss the motto’s relation to the couplet of Latin verse from which it derives and offer a possible explanation of how the misquotation – for such it is – that forms the motto may have come about. Then I say a little about the circumstances under which, some 2000 years ago, the Roman poet Ovid composed the poem which is its source. Finally, I show how consideration of an accurate text of Ovid’s whole original couplet offers an interpretation of the motto that was apposite at the time of the College’s foundation and is no less so more than three centuries later.
