Thomas Adams

Thomas Adams (1583–1652) was an English clergyman and preacher, sometimes called ‘the prose Shakespeare of the Puritans’ for his vivid style. The earliest known English formulation of this proverb — ‘prevention is so much better than healing, because it saves the labour of being sick’ — appears in his collected Works. Even he, though, was reworking a commonplace far older than himself, and he did not write the trimmed modern wording that later sites pinned on Erasmus.