37

37. On the resemblance of children to their fathers

[This is the final chapter of Book II and so, until 1588, the final chapter of the whole work, which ended therefore with two dominant notions: that the Essays are a portrait of Montaigne’s character, opinions and bearing destined for his immediate descendants and friends; that the most marked characteristic of Nature is diversity and discordance.

Montaigne was convinced that he had inherited from his forefathers not only an antipathy to medicine but also the stone (that is, to the suicide pains of colic paroxysms). He explains how he fortified his inherited antipathy to the art of medicine with often contrived arguments, so giving us insights into his mind and incidentally providing a lively picture of life in watering-places. Spa-waters, being natural, might cure the stone and can probably do no harm. But how experimental medicine is ever supposed to be led to a cure for melancholy is another matter…

A major source of Montaigne’s scepticism here about professional arts and sciences is Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s book On the Vanity of all Sciences and on the Excellence of the Word of God.]

[A] All the various pieces of this faggot are being bundled together on the understanding that I am only to set my hand to it in my own home and when I am oppressed by too lax an idleness. So it was assembled at intervals and at different periods, since I sometimes have occasion to be away from home for months on end. Moreover I never correct my first thoughts by second ones – [C] well, except perhaps for the odd word, but to vary it, not to remove it. [A] I want to show my humours as they develop, revealing each element as it is born. I could wish that I had begun earlier, especially tracing the progress of changes in me.

One of the valets I used for dictation stole several pages of mine which were to his liking and thought he had acquired great plunder. It consoles me that he will no more gain anything by it than I shall lose.

Since I began I have aged by some seven or eight years – not without some fresh gain, for those years have generously introduced me to colic paroxysms. Long commerce and acquaintance with the years rarely proceed without some such benefit! I could wish that, of all those gifts which the years store up for those who haunt them, they could have chosen a present more acceptable to me, for they could not have given me anything that since childhood I have held in greater horror. Of all the misfortunes of old age, that was precisely the very one I most dreaded. I often thought to myself that I was travelling too far and that on such a long road I was eventually bound to be embroiled in some nasty encounter; I realized, and much proclaimed, that it was time for me to go. Following the surgeon’s rule when he cuts off a limb, [C] I declared that life should be amputated at the point where it is alive and healthy; he who repays not his debt to Nature in good time usually finds she exacts interest with a vengeance.

[A] But my declarations were in vain. I was so far from being ready to go then that even now, after about eighteen months in this distasteful state, I have already learnt how to get used to it. I have made a compact with this colical style of life; I can find sources of hope and consolation in it. So many men have grown so besotted with their wretched existence that no circumstances are too harsh, provided that they can cling on. [C] Just listen to Maecenas:

Debilem facito manu, Debilem pede, coxa, Lubricos quate dentes: Vita dum superest bene est.

[Lop off a hand; lop off a foot and a thigh; pull out all my teeth: I am all right though: I am still alive.]1

And it was with the philanthropy of a lunatic that Tamberlane cloaked his arbitrary cruelty against lepers when he put to death all those that came to his knowledge – ‘In order,’ he said, ‘to free them from so painful a life.’ Any of them would rather have been thrice a leper than to cease to be.2 When Antisthenes the Stoic was extremely ill he cried out, ‘Who will make me free from these ills?’ Diogenes, who had come to see him, gave him a knife: ‘If you so desire, this soon will,’ he said. There came the reply: ‘I never said from this life: I said, from these ills.’

[A] Sufferings which touch the soul alone afflict me much less than they do most men; that is partly from judgement (for the majority think many things to be dreadful and to be avoided even at the cost of their life which are almost indifferent to me); it is also partly because of my stolid complexion which is insensitive to anything which does not come straight at me; I believe that complexion to be one of the best of my natural characteristics. But bodily sufferings – which are very real – I feel most acutely. And yet, formerly, when I used to foresee them through eyes made weak, fastidious and flabby by the enjoyment of that long and blessed health and ease which God had lent me for the greater part of my life, I thought of them as so unbearable that in truth my fear of them exceeded the suffering they now cause me: that fact further increases my belief that most of the faculties of our soul, [C] as we employ them, [A] disturb our life’s repose rather than serve it.

I am wrestling with the worst of all illnesses, the most unpredictable, the most painful, the most fatal and the most incurable. I have already assayed five or six very long and painful attacks. Yet either I am flattering myself or else, even in this state, a man can still find things bearable if his soul has cast off the weight of the fear of dying and the weight of all the warning threats, inferences and complications which Medicine stuffs into our heads. Even real pain is not so shrill, harsh and stabbing that a man of settled temperament must go mad with despair. I draw at least one advantage from my colic paroxysms: whatever I had failed to do to make myself familiar with death and reconciled to it that illness will do for me: for the more closely it presses upon me and importunes me the less reason I shall have to be afraid to die. I had already succeeded in holding on to life only for what life has to offer: my illness will abrogate even that compact; and may God grant that at the end, if the harsh pain finally overcomes my strength, it may not drive me to the other extreme (no less wrong) of loving and yearning to die.

Summum nec metuas diem, nec optes. [Neither be afraid of your last day nor desire it.]3

Both emotions are to be feared, though one has its remedy nearer at hand.

Moreover I have always considered that precept to be sheer affectation which so rigorously and punctiliously ordains that, when we are enduring pain, we must put on a good countenance and remain proud and calm. Why should Philosophy (whose concerns are with deeds and with inner motions) waste her time over external appearances?4 [C] Let her leave such worries to actors in farces and to masters of rhetoric, who make such a fuss about our gesticulations. Let Philosophy have enough courage to concede that pain may act cowardly so long as the cowardice remains a matter of words, being neither heartfelt nor visceral. Let her classify such plaints (even if they do come from our will) with those sighs, sobs, tremblings and drainings of colour which Nature has placed beyond our control. So long as our minds know no terror and our words no despair, let Philosophy be contented. What does it matter if our arms flay about as long as our thoughts do not? Philosophy put us through our training not for others but for ourselves, so that we may be thus, not seem thus.

[A] Let her limit herself to controlling our intellect, which she has undertaken to instruct. Against the onslaught of colic paroxysms let her enable us to have souls capable of knowing themselves and following their accustomed courses, souls fighting pain and sustaining it, not shamelessly grovelling at her feet, souls stirred and aroused for battle, not cast down and subdued, [C] able to communicate and to some extent able to converse.

[A] In such extreme misfortunes it is cruelty to require of us too studied a comportment. If we play our role well, it matters little if we put a bad face on things! If the body finds relief in lamentations, let it; if it wants to toss about, let it writhe and contort as much as it likes; if the body believes that some of the pain can be driven off as vapour by forcing out our cries – or if doing so distracts us from the anguish, as some doctors say it helps pregnant women in their deliveries – just let it shout out. [C] Do not order the sound to come but allow it to do so. Epicurus does not merely allow his wise man to yell out in torment, he counsels him to: ‘Pugiles etiam, quum feriunt in jactandis coestibus, ingemiscunt, quia profundenda voce omne corpus intenditur, venitque plaga vehementior.’ [Even the wrestlers grunt when lashing out with their boxing-gloves, because uttering such sounds makes the whole body tense, driving the blow home with greater vehemence.]5 [A] We have pangs enough from the pain without the pangs caused by clinging to superfluous rules.

It is usual to see men thrown into turmoil by the [C] attacks and [A] assaults of this illness; it is for them that I have said all this; for in my own case I have up till now put on a slightly better countenance: not that I take any trouble to maintain a decent appearance, for I do not think much of such an achievement and, in this respect, concede whatever my illness demands: but either the pain in my case is not so excessive or else I can show more steadfastness than most. I moan and groan when the stabbing pains hurt most acutely but I do not [C] lose control like this fellow:

Ejulatu, questu, gemitu, fremitibus Resonando multum flebiles voces refert.

[Re-echoing with his tearful voice, wailing, groaning, lamenting, sighing.]6

At the darkest moment of the paroxysm I explore myself and have always found that I am still capable of talking, thinking and replying as sensibly as at any other time but not as imperturbably, since the pain disturbs me and distracts me. When those around me start to spare me, thinking that I am at my lowest ebb, I often assay my strength and broach a subject as completely removed as possible from my condition. I can bring off anything with a sudden effort. But do not ask it to last…

If only I were like that dreamer in Cicero who dreamed he had a woman in his arms and had the faculty of ejaculating his gallstone in the bedclothes!7 My own gallstones monstrously unlecher me!

[A] In the intervals between these extremes of anguish, [C] when my urinary ducts are sick but without the stabbing pains, [A] I return at once to my accustomed form, since my soul knows no call to arms without bodily feeling – I definitely owe that to the care I once took to prepare myself by reason for such misfortunes:

[B] laborumNulla mihi nova nunc facies inopinaque surgit; Omnia præcepi atque animo mecum ante peregi.

[No toils present themselves new or unforeseen: I have seen them coming and been through them already in my mind.]8

[A] But I have been assayed rather too roughly for an apprentice; the blow was indeed sudden and rough, for I fell all at once from a most gentle and happy mode of life into the most painful and distressing one imaginable: for, leaving aside the fact that the stone is an illness itself to be dreaded, its onset was in my case unusually difficult and harsh. Attacks recur so frequently that nowadays I hardly ever feel perfectly well. Yet if only I can add duration to the state in which I now maintain my spirits, I shall be in very much better circumstances than hundreds of others who have no fever nor illness except the ones which they inflict on themselves by defect of reason.

There is a certain kind of wily humility which is born of presumption. This for instance: we admit there are many things we do not understand; we confess frankly enough that within the works of Nature there are some qualities and attributes which we find incomprehensible, the means or the causes of which cannot be discovered by capacities such as ours. With so frank and scrupulous an admission we hope to make people believe what we say about the ones we do claim to understand. Yet there is no need to go picking over strange problems or miracles; it seems to me that among the things which we see quite regularly there are ones so strange and incomprehensible that they surpass all that is problematic in miracles.

What a prodigious thing it is that within the drop of semen which brings us forth there are stamped the characteristics not only of the bodily form of our forefathers but of their ways of thinking and their slant of mind. Where can that drop of fluid lodge such an infinite number of Forms? [B] How does it come to transmit these resemblances in so casual and random a manner that the great-grandson is like his great-grandfather, the nephew like his uncle? In the family of Lepidus in Rome there were born three children (not all at once; there were gaps between them) with cartilage over the very same eye.9 There was a whole family in Thebes whose members all bore birthmarks shaped like a lance-head; any child who did not do so was held to be illegitimate. According to Aristotle There is a certain nation where they have wives in common and where children were assigned to fathers by resemblances.

[A] We can assume that it is to my father that I owe my propensity to the stone, for he died dreadfully afflicted by a large stone in the bladder. He was not aware of it until he was sixty-seven; he had experienced no sign or symptom of it beforehand, in his loins or his sides or anywhere else. Until then he had not been subject to much illness and had in fact enjoyed excellent health; he lasted another seven years with that affliction, lingering towards a very painful end.

Now I was born twenty-five years and more before he fell ill, during his most vigorous period: I was his third child. During all that time where did that propensity for this affliction lie a-brooding? When his own illness was still so far off, how did that little piece of his own substance which went to make me manage to transmit so marked a characteristic to me? And how was it so hidden that I only began to be aware of it forty-five years later – so far the only one to do so out of so many brothers and sisters, all from the same mother? If anyone can tell me how this comes about I will trust his explanations of as many other miracles as he likes – providing that he does not fob me off (as they usually do) with a theory which is more difficult and more fanciful than the thing itself.

Doctors will have to pardon my liberty a while, but from that same ejaculation and penetration I was destined to receive my loathing and contempt for their dogmas: my antipathy to their Art is hereditary; my father lived to seventy-four, my grandfather to sixty-nine, my great-grandfather to nearly eighty, none having swallowed any kind of drug. ‘Medicine’ for them meant anything they did not use regularly.

The Art of Medicine is built from examples and experience. So are my opinions. Have I not just cited an experience both relevant and convincing? I doubt if the annals of medicine can provide an example of three generations born, bred and dying in the same home under the same roof who have lived under doctor’s orders as long as they did. Doctors will have to concede that on my side there is either reason or luck. And with them luck is a more valuable commodity than reason…

But they must not take advantage of me now, and certainly not threaten me after I have been struck down: that would not be fair. I have truly won a solid victory over them with that example of the rest of my family, even if it stops with them. Human affairs allow of no greater constancy: we have assayed our beliefs now for two centuries minus eighteen years: my great-grandfather was born in the year one thousand four hundred and two. It is only right that this experiment of ours should begin to run out on us. Let them not quote against me the illness which has got a stranglehold on me now. Is it not enough that even I stayed healthy for forty-seven years? Even if it should prove to be the end of our course, it has been longer than most.

My forebears disapproved of medicine because of some unexplained natural inclination. The very sight of medicine horrified my father. The Seigneur de Gaviac was one of my uncles on my father’s side; he was in holy orders, a weakling from birth, who nevertheless struggled on to sixty-seven; once he did fall victim of a grave and delirious attack of Continual Fever; the doctors ordered that he be informed that he would definitely die if he did not call in aid – (what they call ‘aid’ is more often than not an impediment). Terrified though he was by this dreadful sentence of death, that good man replied: ‘I am dead then.’ But soon afterwards God showed the vanity of their prognosis.

[B] I had four brothers; the youngest, born a long time after the others, was the Sieur de Bussaguet; he was the only one to submit to the Art of medicine, doing so I think because of his contacts with practitioners of other arts, since he was counsellor in the Court of Parliament. It turned out so badly for him that, despite apparently having the strongest of complexions, he died way before all the others with the sole exception of the Sieur de Saint-Michel.

[A] Though it is possible that I inherited this natural aversion from my ancestors I would have assayed ways of countering it if that had been the only factor, since all non-rational inborn tendencies are a kind of disease which ought to be fought against. It may well be that I inherited the disposition, but I have supported it, fortified it, and corroborated my opinions, by reasoned argument: I loathe such motives as refusing medicine just because it tastes bitter. My temperament is not at all like that: I believe health to be so precious that I would buy it at the cost of the most agonizing of incisions and cauterizations. [C] Following Epicurus I believe pleasures are to be avoided if they result in greater pain, and pain is to be welcomed if it results in greater pleasure.10

[A] Health is precious. It is the only thing to the pursuit of which it is truly worth devoting not only our time but our sweat, toil, goods and life itself. Without health all pleasure, scholarship and virtue lose their lustre and fade away. The most firmly supported arguments against this that Philosophy seeks to impress on us can be answered by this hypothesis: imagine Plato struck down by epilepsy or apoplexy; then challenge him to get any help from all those noble and splendid faculties of his soul.

No road leading to health can be called rough or expensive for me. But there are other likely reasons too which make me suspicious of all such trafficking. I do not deny that there may be an element of art in medicine. It is quite certain that among all the works of Nature things may be found with properties which can preserve our health. [B] I mean that there are simples which moisten and desiccate; I know from experience that horseradish produces flatulence and that senna-pods act as an aperient. Experience has taught me other things too; so that I know that that mutton nourishes me and wine warms me (Solon used to say that eating was like other remedies: it was a cure for a disease called hunger).11 I do not reject practices drawn from the natural world; I do not doubt the power and fecundity of Nature nor her devotion to our needs. I can see that the pike and the swallows do well under her. What I am suspicious of are the things discovered by our own minds, our sciences and by that Art of theirs in favour of which we have abandoned Nature and her rules and on to which we do not know how to impose the limits of moderation.

[C] What we call justice is a farrago of any old laws which fall into our hands, dispensed and applied often quite ineptly and iniquitously; those who mock at this and complain of it are not reviling that noble virtue itself but only condemning the abuse and the profanation of that venerable name of justice. So too with medicine: I honour its glorious name, its aim and its promises, so useful to the human race; but what that name actually designates among us I neither honour nor esteem.

[A] In the first place experience makes me afraid of it, for as far as I can see no tribe of people are more quickly ill nor more slowly well than those who are under the jurisdiction of medicine. The constraints of their diets impair and corrupt their health. Doctors are not content with treating illness; they make good health ill too so as to stop us ever escaping from their jurisdiction. Do they not assert that long and continuous good health argues future illness?

I have been ill quite frequently; without help from doctors I have found my illnesses – and I have assayed virtually all of them – quite easy to bear and as short-lasting as anyone else’s; and I have done this without bringing in the bitter taste of their prescriptions. My health is complete and untrammelled, with no rule but my habits, no discipline but my good pleasure. Any place is good enough for me to stay in: I need no more comforts when I am ill than when I am well. I do not get worked up because there is no doctor or no apothecary nearby to come to my aid (something which I can see to be a greater affliction for some people than the illness itself). Yet are the lives of doctors themselves so long and so happy that they can witness to the manifest effectiveness of their discipline?

Every nation existed without medicine for centuries (that was the first age of Man, the best and the happiest centuries); even now less than a tenth of the world makes use of it. Nations without number have no knowledge of medicine and live longer and more healthily than we do here. And among us the common folk manage happily without it. The Roman People were six hundred years old before they adopted it; then, having assayed it, they drove it out of their city at the instance of Cato the Censor who showed how easily he could do without it, having lived to be eighty-five himself and helping his wife to live to an extreme old age – not without medicine but without medical practitioners. (Anything at all which promotes good health can be called medicine.)

Plutarch says that Cato kept his family in good health by making use, [A1] it appears, [A] of the hare, just as the Arcadians, according to Pliny, cured all illnesses with cow’s milk.12 [C] Herodotus asserts that the Libyan people all enjoy a rare degree of good health owing to their custom of searing the veins in the head and temples of their children with cauteries at the age of four, thus blocking the way for the rest of their lives to all morbid defluxions of mucous. [A] And the villagers round here when they are ill never use anything but the strongest wine they can get, mixed with plenty of saffron and spice. And they all work equally well.

Truly, among all that confusing diversity of prescriptions is there any practical result except the evacuation of the bowels? Hundreds of homely simples can produce that. [B] And I am not convinced that the action of the bowels is as beneficial as they claim; perhaps our nature needs, Up to a point, the residue of its excreta just as wine must be kept on its lees if you want to preserve it. You can often see healthy men succumbing, from some external cause, to attacks of vomiting or diarrhoea: they have a big turn turn-out of excrement without any prior need or subsequent benefit: indeed it does harm; they get worse. [C] It is from the great Plato himself that I recently learned that of the three motions which apply to men, the last and the worst is the motion of purgations; no man, unless he is a fool, should undergo one except of extreme necessity.13 We set about disturbing and activating our illnesses by fighting them with contraries: yet it ought to be our way of life which gently reduces them and brings them to an end. Those violent clashes between the illness and the medicine always cost us dear since the quarrel is fought out in our inwards, while drugs give us unreliable support, being by their nature the enemy of our health and gaining access into our estates only through disturbances.

Let us leave things alone for a while: that Order which provides for the flea and the mole also provides for all men who suffer themselves to be governed by it as the flea and the mole are. We shout Gee up in vain: it will make our throats sore but not make that Order go faster, for it is proud and knows no pity. Our fear and despair repel it and delay its help for us rather than summoning it. It owes it to disease as to health that each should run its course. It will not be bribed to favour one at the expense of the rights of the other: for then it would become Disorder. For God’s sake let us follow. I repeat, follow. That Order leads those who follow: those who will not follow will be dragged along,14 medicine, terror and all. Get them to prescribe an aperient for your brain; it will be better employed there than in your stomach.

[A] When I Spartan was asked what made him live so long, ‘Ignorance of medicine,’ he replied. And the Emperor Hadrian kept repeating as he lay dying that ‘all those doctors’ had killed him.15 [B] When a bad wrestler became a doctor Diogenes said, ‘That’s the spirit. You are right. Now you can pin to the ground all those who used to do it to you.’ [A] But doctors are lucky [B] according to Nicocles: [A] the sun shines on their successes and the earth hides their failures; on top of that they have a way of turning anything which happens to their own advantage: medicine claims the right to take credit for every improvement or cure brought about by Fortune, Nature or any other external cause (and the number of those is infinite). When a patient is under doctors’ orders anything lucky which happens to him is always due to them. Take those opportune circumstances which have cured me and hundreds of others who never call in medical help: in the case of their patients doctors simply usurp them. And when anything untoward happens they either disclaim responsibility altogether or else blame it on the patient, finding reasons so vacuous that they need never fear they will ever run out of them: ‘he bared his arm’; [B] ‘he heard the noise of a coach’–

rhedarum transitas arcto Vicorum inflexu;

[wagons passing at the bends in narrow streets;]16

– [A] ‘somebody opened a window’; ‘he has been lying on his left side’; ‘he has let painful thoughts run through his head’. In short a word, a, dream, a glance, all appear to be sufficient excuses for shrugging off the burden of responsibility.

Or when we get worse they take advantage of that too if they want to, profiting from another ploy which can never fail: when their poultices merely help to inflame the illness they palm us off with assertions that without their remedies things would have been even worse. They take a man with a bad cold, turn it into a recurrent fever, then claim that without them it would have been a continual fever. No need to worry that business should be bad: when an illness grows worse it means greater profits for them. They are certainly right to require their patients to favour them with their trust. It truly has to be trust – and a pliant trust too – to cling to notions so hard to believe.

[B] Plato put it well when he allowed freedom to lie to no one but doctors, since their promises are empty and vain but our health depends on them.17

[A] Aesop is an author of the choicest excellence, though few people discover all his beauties; he agreeably portrays the tyrannous authority which doctors usurp over wretched souls weakened by sickness and prostrated by fear when he tells how a patient was asked by his doctor what effects he felt from a medicine he had given him: ‘I sweated a lot,’ said the patient. ‘Good,’ said the doctor. Another time he asked him how he had fared since then: ‘I felt extremely cold and shivery,’ he said. – ‘Good,’ replied the doctor. On a third occasion he again asked him how he felt: ‘All puffy and swollen up,’ he said, ‘as though I had dropsy.’ – ‘Excellent!’ said the doctor. Then one of the patient’s close friends came to ask how things were with him. ‘I am dying of good health, my friend,’ he replied.18

They used to have a more equitable contract in Egypt: for the first three days the doctor took on the patient at the patient’s risk and peril: when the three days were up, the risks and perils were the doctor’s. Is it right that Aesculapius, the patron of medicine, should have been struck down by a thunderbolt for having brought the dead [’95] Hippolytus19 [A] back to life –

[B] Nam pater omnipotens, aliquem indignatus ab umbris Mortalem infernis ad lumina surgere vitæ, Ipse repertorem medicinæ talis et artis Fulmine Phæbigenam stygias detrusit ad undas

[For the Father Almighty, angry that a mortal should rise from the Shades of the Underworld to the light of the living, struck down the discoverer of the Art of Medicine, the son of Apollo, and with his thunderbolt cast him into the waters of Styx]

– [A] while his followers who send so many souls from life to death find absolution! [B] A doctor was boasting to Nicocles that his Art had great prestige. Nicocles retorted: ‘It must indeed be so, if you can kill so many people with impunity.’

[A] Meanwhile if they had asked my advice I would have rendered their teachings even more mysterious and awesome. They began well but did not keep it up to the end. A good start that, making gods and daemons the authors of their doctrines and then adopting a specialized language and style of writing – [C] even though Philosophy may think that it is madness to give a man good counsel which is unintelligible: ‘Ut si quis medicus imperat ut sumat: “Terrigenam, herbigradam, domiportam, sanguine cassant”…’ [As though a doctor’s prescription for a diet should say: ‘Take terrigenous herbigressive autodomiciled desanguinated gasteropods…’]20

[A] It has proved a rule good for the Art (found in all vain fantastical supernatural arts) that the patient must first trust in the remedy with firm hope and assurance before it can work effectively. They cling to that rule so far as to hold that a bad doctor whom a patient trusts is better than the most experienced one whom he does not know.

The very constituents selected for their remedies recall mystery and sorcery: the left foot of a tortoise, the urine of a lizard, the droppings of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon; and for those of us with colic paroxysms (so contemptuously do they abuse our wretchedness) triturated rat-shit and similar apish trickery which look more like magic spells than solid knowledge. I will not even mention pills to be taken in odd numbers; the designation of particular days and festivals as ominous; the prescribing of specific times for gathering the herbs for their ingredients; and the severe, solemn expression on doctors’ faces which even Pliny laughs at.

Where doctors went wrong (I mean after such a good start) is that they did not also make their assemblies more religious and their deliberations more secret: no profane layman ought to have access to them, no more than to the secret ceremonies of Aesculapius. Because of this error their uncertainties and the feebleness of their arguments, of their guesswork and of their premises, as well as the bitterness of their disagreements (full of hatred, of envy and personal considerations), have all been revealed to everybody, so that a man must be wondrously blind if he does not feel at risk in their hands.

Did you ever find a doctor taking over a colleague’s prescription without putting in something extra or cutting something out? That gives their Art away and reveals that they are more concerned with their own reputation (and therefore with their fee) than with the well-being of their patients. The wisest of them all was he who decreed that each patient should be treated by only one doctor:21 for if he does no good the failure of one single man would be no great reproach to the whole Art of medicine, but if on the contrary he does strike lucky, then great is the glory; whereas when many are involved, they discredit their trade at every turn, especially since they normally manage to do more harm than good. They ought to have remained satisfied with the constant disagreements to be found among the opinions of the great masters and ancient authorities of their Art – only the bookish know about those – without letting everybody know of their controversies and the intellectual inconsistencies which they still foster and prolong among themselves.

Do we want to see an example of medical disagreement among the Ancients? Hierophilus locates the original cause of illness in the humours; Erasistratus, in arterial blood; Asclepiades, in invisible atoms flowing through the pores; Alcmaeon, in the exuberancy or deficiency of bodily strength; Diocles, in the imbalance of our corporeal elements and the balance of the air that we breathe; Strato, in the quantity, crudity and decomposition of the food we eat; and Hippocrates locates it in our spirits.22

A friend of the doctors, whom they know better than I do, exclaims in this connection that it is a great misfortune that the most important of all the sciences we use, the one with responsibility for our health and preservation, should be the most uncertain, the most unstable and the one shaken by the most changes.

There is no great harm done if we miscalculate the height of the sun or the fractions in some astronomical computation: but here, when it is a matter of the whole of our being, there is no wisdom in abandoning ourselves to the mercy of so many contrary gales.

Nothing much was heard of this science before the Peloponnesian War. It was brought into repute by Hippocrates. Everything he established was overturned by Chrysippus; everything Chrysippus wrote was then overturned by Erasistratus, the grandson of Aristotle. After that lot there came the Empirics who in their Art adopted a method quite different from the Ancients; when their reputation began to grow shaky, Herophilus succeeded in getting a new kind of medicine accepted, which Asclepiades came and attacked, destroying it in his turn. Then successively the opinions of Themison gained authority, then Musa’s, then later still those of Vexius Valens (the doctor famous for his intimacy with Messalina). At the time of Nero, the empire (of medicine) fell to Thessalus, who condemned and destroyed everything taught before him. His teachings were subsequently struck down by Crinas of Massilia, whose new contribution was to regulate all the workings of medicines by ephemerides and astral movements, making men eat, sleep and drink at the times which suited the Moon or Mercury. His authority was soon supplanted by that of Charinus, also a doctor in Massilia; he not only fought against Ancient medicine but also against the centuries-old public institution of hot baths. He made his patients take cold baths even in winter, immersing the sick in streams of fresh-water.

Before Pliny’s time no Roman had ever condescended to practise medicine; that was done by Greeks and foreigners – as among us French it is practised by spouters of Latin. As a very great doctor has said, we do not easily accept treatments we can understand, any more than we [C] trust the simples we ourselves gather.23 [A] If those nations where we find our guaiacum, sarsaparilla and china-root have doctors of their own, just think how exoticism and costliness must make them esteem our cabbages and our parsley: who would dare to despise plants sought in such distant lands at the risk of long and perilous journeys!

Since those medical upheavals among the Ancients there have been innumerable others up to our own times, mostly total fundamental revolutions like those recently produced by Paracelsus, Fioravanti and Argenterius; I am told that they do not only change the odd prescription but the woof and web and the government of the medical corpus, accusing those who professed it before them of being ignorant charlatans.24

I leave you to imagine where that leaves the wretched patient.

If we could only be sure that their mistakes did us no harm even if they did no good it would be a reasonable bet to chance gaining something without risk of losing everything. [B] But Aesop tells how a man bought a Moorish slave and thought that his colour was incidental, brought on by ill-treatment from his former master; so he had him carefully physicked with baths and medical concoctions. As a result the Moor was not cured of swarthiness but he did lose his good health. [A] How often have we found doctors blaming each other for the deaths of their patients! I remember the local epidemic a few years ago: it was fatally dangerous. When the storm was over (having swept away innumerable people) one of the most celebrated doctors in the land published a booklet on the subject in which he regretted having prescribed bloodletting, admitting that it was one of the principal sources of the harm that was done.25

Moreover their authors maintain that there is no medicine without harmful side-effects: if those which do us some good do us some harm as well, what must the other ones do when applied to us quite abusively?

As for those who loathe the taste of medicine, I personally feel that, even if for no other reason, it would be dangerous and harmful for them to make themselves force it down at so inappropriate a time: just when they need rest it constitutes, I think, an unacceptable assay of their strength. Besides when I consider the factors which are said to occasion our illnesses I find them so slight and so specific that I am forced to conclude that even a tiny error in the prescribed dosage could do us great harm.

Now things go very bad indeed for us if our doctor’s mistake is a dangerous one, for it is difficult for him not to go on falling into yet more errors. To aim at the right target his treatment must embrace very many factors, circumstances and elements: he must know his patient’s complexion, his temperament, his humours, his inclinations, his actions, even his thoughts and his ideas; he must take into account external circumstances such as the nature of the locality, the condition of the air and the weather, the position of the planets and their influences; then he must know what causes the illness, its symptoms and their effects and the day when the crisis is reached. Where the drugs themselves are concerned he must know their dosage and their strength, their country of origin, appearance and maturity as well as the right prescription. And then he must know how to combine those elements together in the right proportions so as to produce a perfect balance. If he gets any one of them slightly wrong, or if one of his principles is slightly awry, that is enough to undo us. Only God knows how difficult it is to understand most of these elements; for example, how can a doctor discover the proper symptoms of your illness when each illness can comport an infinite number of them? How many hesitations and disputes do they have over the analysis of urines? Otherwise, how could we explain their ceaseless wranglings over their diagnoses? How else could we excuse their ‘mistaking sables for foxes’ – the fault they fall into so often? In such illnesses that I have had, as soon as there was the slightest complication I never found three doctors to agree.

I am most impressed by the examples which could affect me.

Recently there was a nobleman in Paris who was cut on doctor’s orders: the surgeon found he no more had a stone in his bladder than in the palm of his hand.

Then there was a close friend of mine, a bishop; most of the doctors he consulted urgently pressed him to be cut; trusting in the others, I too joined in the persuasion; once he was dead they opened him up and found he only had vague kidney trouble. They have less excuse in the case of the stone, which, to some extent, can be felt by probing. That is why surgery always seems to me to be more exact: it sees and feels its way along; there is less conjecture and guesswork: medicine has no vaginal prod which can open up the passages of our brains, our lungs or our livers.

The very promises of medicine pass belief; for doctors have to treat several maladies which afflict us at the same time and which, almost of necessity, are interconnected – for example, a heated liver and a chilled stomach; they try to persuade us that some of their ingredients warm the stomach while others refresh the liver: one is said to go straight to the liver or even to the very bladder without displaying its powers on the way and while conserving its efficacity and virtues throughout that long journey with all its pitfalls, until it arrives where its occult properties are destined to apply. This one desiccates the brain while the other humidifies the lungs. Is it not a kind of raving madness to think you can mix a draught out of all those remedies and then hope that all the virtues of the drugs contained in that chaotic mixture will split themselves up, sort themselves out and rush each to its divergent task? I would have endless fears that the instructions on their labels might get lost or switched round so that they confuse their destinations! And how can anyone think that the various properties in that liquid jumble would not corrupt, counteract and subvert each other? Then again the prescription has to be made up by another expert and our lives placed at the mercy of his good faith too.

[C] When it comes to clothing ourselves we have tailors specializing in doublets or breeches; they serve us better because each sticks to his trade and his restricted area of competence; when it comes to food, great households employ cooks who are specialists in soups or in roasts: no cook with an overall responsibility can make them so exquisitely. The same applies to cures: the Egyptians were right to reject general practitioners and to split the profession up, one man working on each illness and each part of the body, which were then treated more appropriately and less indiscriminately since each doctor was only concerned with his speciality.26 Our doctors never realize that he who provides for all provides for none and that the overall organization of our human microcosm is too much for them to digest. While they were frightened to stop a dysentery lest it brought on a fever, they killed a friend of mine who was worth more than the lot of them, however many there may be. They attach more weight to their guesses about the future than to present illnesses; so as not to cure the brain at the expense of the stomach, they harm the stomach and aggravate the brain with their tumultuous and dissident drugs.

[A] The rational bases of this particular Art are more feeble, clearly, and contradictory than those of any other: aperient substances are good for a patient suffering from colic paroxysm, because they dilate and distend the tubes and so facilitate the passage of the glutinous matter which can build up into gravel or stone, so evacuating whatever is beginning to gather and to harden in the kidneys; aperient substances are dangerous for a patient suffering from colic paroxysm, because by dilating and distending the tubes they facilitate the passage towards the kidneys of substances whose property is to build up the gravel, for which the kidneys have a propensity, so that it is difficult to stop them retaining much of what passes through them; moreover if there should happen to be some solid body a trifle too large to pass through the narrows which have to be navigated if the gravel is to be expelled, this body may be set in motion by the aperient and forced into these narrow channels, bunging them up and causing inevitable and painful death.

They show the same certainty in the advice they give us about healthy living: it is good to pass water frequently, for experience shows us that by allowing it to stand we let its lees and impurities settle; they then serve to build up stones in the bladder; it is good not to pass water frequently: since the heavier impurities borne along in the urine will be discharged only if evacuated violently (we know from experience that a rushing torrent scours the bed it passes through more thoroughly than a sluggish, debilitated stream). Similarly: it is good to lie frequently with our wives, because it dilates the tubes and carries away the sand and gravel; but it is bad, since it overheats the kidneys, tires them and weakens them.27

[Al] It is good to take hot baths at the spas, because they relax and soften the places where the sand or stone is lurking: it is bad, because such an application of external heat encourages the kidneys to concoct, harden and then petrify the matter which is deposited therein. Once you are at the spa, it is healthier to eat little during the evenings, so that when you take the waters in the morning they can work more effectively because they encounter a stomach empty and unclogged; but, on the contrary, it is better not to eat much at midday, so as not to confuse the workings of the spa-water which are not yet completed and so as not to overload the stomach too soon after such a labour: it is wiser to allow food to digest overnight, which is better than the daytime, during which the mind and body are in ceaseless movement and agitation.

That is how they juggle and trifle with reason – to our detriment. [B] They cannot give me a single proposition against which I could not construct an opposing one equally valid. [Al] Stop railing then at those who, amid such confusion, allow themselves to be gently led by their feelings and by the counsels of Nature, entrusting themselves to common fate.

My travels have provided occasions for seeing virtually all the famous baths of Christendom; I have been using them for some years now, for I reckon that bathing in general is salubrious and I believe that our health has suffered several quite serious inconveniences since we lost the habit (which was formerly observed by virtually all peoples and still is by many) of washing our bodies every day; I can only think that we are all the worse for having our limbs encrusted and our pores blocked up with filth.

As for drinking the waters, fortunately that is in the first place not inimical to my taste; secondly it is both natural and simple and so, at the very least, not dangerous even if it does no good. To support that I can refer to the huge crowds which assemble there, people of every condition and every complexion. Although I have never seen any miraculous or extraordinary cures there – on the contrary whenever I have bothered to investigate a little more carefully than is usual I have found all the rumours of cures which are scattered about such places to be ill-founded and false (despite their being believed, since people easily deceive themselves when they want to) – nevertheless I have also hardly met anyone who was made worse by taking the waters; and you cannot honestly deny that they stimulate the appetite, help the digestion and liven us up a bit (unless you are already too weak when you go there, something I would advise you against). They cannot rebuild massy ruins but they can shore up a tottering wall or forestall the threat of something worse.

If you cannot come with enough spriteliness to enjoy the company gathered there or the walks and relaxations to which we are tempted by the beauty of the countryside in which most of these spas are situated, you certainly lose the better and surer part of their effect. For this reason I have so far chosen to stay and take the waters at the more beautifully situated spas where you find more pleasant lodgings, food and company, such as the baths at Bagnères in France, Plombières on the border between Germany and Lorraine, Baden in Switzerland and Lucca in Tuscany (especially the Spa at Della Villa, which I have used most often and at various seasons).

Each country has its own peculiar opinions about how to make use of the waters as well as their own rules and methods. In my experience the effects are virtually identical. In Germany it is not done to drink them; for all illnesses people stay in the waters from sunrise to sunset like frogs. In Italy, for every nine days they drink they bathe at least thirty; they usually drink the waters mixed with additional medicinal substances to help them to work. Here in France people are told to go for a walk to help digest the water; elsewhere they make you stay in the bed where you drank it until you have voided it, while keeping your stomach and feet warm. The peculiarity of the Germans is to use cupping-horns or cupping-glasses in the bath, accompanied by scarification; the Italians have their doccie, which are showers of hot water conveyed through pipes; for a whole month they douse their head or their stomach, or whatever part is to be treated, for an hour in the morning and the same in the afternoon. There are innumerable differences in the customs of each country or, more correctly, virtually no agreement whatsoever between them.

So much then for the only branch of medicine which I have frequented; it is the least artificial but has its fair share of the confusion and uncertainty you see everywhere else in that Art.28

[A] Poets can choose how to say it with more eloquence and grace; witness these two epigrams:

Alcon hestemo signum jovis attigit. Ille, Quamvis marmoreus, vim patitur medici. Ecce hodie, jussus transferri ex æde vetusta, Effertur, quamvis sit Deus atque lapis.

[Alcon touched Jove’s statue yesterday. It was of marble, but it felt that doctor’s power! You see, god of stone though it was, they bore it out of its hallowed temple today and buried it.]

And the second one:

Lotus nobiscum est hilaris, cæavit et idem, Inventus mane est mortuus Andragoras. Tarn subitæ mortis causam, Faustine, requins? In somnis medicum viderat Hermocratem.

[Andragoras was laughing and bathing with us yesterday; he dined with us too. This morning he was found dead. Do you want to know, Faustinus, why he died so suddenly? He had a dream about Dr Hermocrates.]

I can add two stories to that.

The Baron de Caupène, in Chalosse, is joint patron with me of a benefice called Lahontan at the foot of our mountains; it covers a wide area. There befell to the inhabitants of this region what they also tell of the inhabitants of the valley of Angrougne. Once upon a time there they lived cut off, with their own peculiar ways, dress and manners, ruled by their own peculiar institutions and governed by their own customs which were handed down from father to son and to which they were bound by no constraint other than respect for tradition. This tiny state had lasted from ancient times in such happy circumstances that no neighbouring judge had ever been troubled to inquire into the affairs of its inhabitants, no lawyer had ever earned fees by giving them advice, no outsider had ever been called in to settle a quarrel, and nobody in the whole region was ever known to beg. They avoided all leagues and dealings with the outside world so as not to soil the purity of their institutions, until eventually, so they tell, one of their number, as their fathers could remember, was spurred on by an ambition for nobility and decided to increase the honour and reputation of his name by educating one of his sons to become a lawyer, Maître Jean or Maître Pierre. He had him taught to write in a neighbouring town and turned him into a fine village village notary-public. As he rose higher he began to despise their ancient customs and to stuff the locals’ heads with thoughts of the glorious world beyond. The first of his companions to be tricked out of a goat he counselled to seek satisfaction from the King’s judges nearby; then, from one thing on to another he bastardized everything.

This corruption, so they tell, was soon followed by another with graver results when a doctor conceived a desire to marry one of their maidens and to dwell among them. First he taught them the names of their fevers, rheums and swellings; he told them where their hearts were, their livers and their intestines (something quite unknown to them before). Instead of the garlic which they had formerly used to cure any ills, no matter how harsh or serious they were, he taught them to take strange mixtures for their coughs and colds and began to do good business not only out of their health but out of their deaths.

They swear that only after he came did they realize that the air at nightfall gives them heavy heads,29 that drinking when overheated does them harm, that the winds of autumn are more unhealthy than those of spring. Only since they started following this medicine of his have they found themselves overwhelmed by a legion of unaccustomed maladies and noticed a general decline in their former vigour. Their lives have been shortened by half.

That is the first of my tales.

The other is that, before I fell victim to the stone, I heard a fuss being made about billy-goats’ blood, which many considered to be like manna from heaven vouchsafed to Man in recent centuries to protect and preserve our human lives; many intelligent people talked of it as an infallible wonder-cure. Being a man convinced that I may well fall prey to any misfortune which strikes another, it was my pleasure to produce this wonder while I was yet in full health; I ordered a billy-goat on my farm to be fed as prescribed; it has to be segregated during the hottest months of summer and given only aperient herbs to eat and white wine to drink. I happened to return home the very day it was slaughtered; they came and told me that my cook discovered in its paunch, among all the edible parts, two or three large balls which rattled together. I was careful to have all the entrails brought to me and got them to slit open the great heavy paunch; three large objects fell out; light as sponges, they looked hollow yet were hard and tough on the outside and mottled in several dullish colours. One was perfectly round, as big as a bowling the other two were smaller, not so perfectly round but apparently still growing. When I asked those who regularly slaughter such beasts I was told that such things are unusual and rarely found. It is probable that they were stones related to our own kind, and that it is vain for a sufferer from the gravel to hope to be cured by the blood of a goat about to die of a similar illness. As for asserting that the blood itself is not affected by such contact and that its usual virtues are not impaired, it is more likely that nothing is engendered within a body but by the conspiring of all the parts working together; the whole mass is involved, although one member may contribute more than another depending on the various ways they work. It seems very probable that in all the members of that billy-goat there was some quality of petrification.

I was curious about this experiment, not so much [C] for myself or from fears of the future [A] but because,30 in my home as in many others, the womenfolk make a store of such remedies to help the local people, prescribing the same remedy for some fifty illnesses; they never take it themselves yet exult when it works well.

In the meanwhile I honour doctors, less as the precept goes ‘for the need’ (since against that may be set the example of the prophet reproving King Asa for having ‘sought to the physicians’) but because I like the men themselves, having known several honourable and likeable ones.31 I have nothing against doctors, only against their Art; I do not blame them much for taking advantage of our follies: most people do; many vocations, both less honourable and more so, have no other base or stay than the abuse of a trusting public. When I am ill I call them in if they happen to be around at the right time: I ask them for treatment and pay up like anyone else. I grant them leave to order me32 [C] to wrap up warm… if I prefer it that way; [A] they can prescribe either leeks or lettuce to make me my broth or can limit me to white wine or claret – and so on, for anything which my appetite or habits judge indifferent. [Al] I know that that does not really help them, since bitterness and rareness are essential properties of all medicines. Why did Lycurgus order sick Spartans to drink wine? Because when in health they hated it, just as a gentleman in my neighbourhood uses wine as a successful cure for fever precisely because by nature he hates the very taste of it.

[A] How many of the doctors we know share this humour of mine, never condescending to use medicine themselves but living untrammelled lives, flat contrary to what they prescribe for others? If that is not openly mocking our simple-mindedness what is? For their life and health are as dear to them as ours to us and they would practise what they preach if they did not know it to be false. What blinds us is our fear of pain and death, our inability to put up with illness and an insane indiscriminate thirst for cures; what makes our credulity so pliant and impressionable is pure funk. [C] Even then, most people do not so much believe in it as tolerate it; I hear them talking and complaining about medicine as I do; but they end up saying, ‘What else can I do?’ As though lack of endurance were superior to endurance.

[A] Is there a single case of anyone who subjects himself to such wretchedness who does not also give way to all sorts of imposters, putting himself at the mercy of anyone shameless enough to promise him a cure?

[C] The Babylonians used to carry their sick into the market-place: the people were their doctors, each passer-by asking how they felt and giving them advice on getting better based on their own experience.33 We do much the same. [A] There is hardly one silly little woman whose spells and amulets we fail to use; and my own humour would lead me to accept such remedies (if I had to accept any): at least there are no ill-effects to fear from them. [C] What Homer and Plato said of Egyptians, that they were all doctors, applies to all nations; there is nobody who does not boast of his nostrum and risk it on a neighbour who trusts him.

[A] The other day I was in company when a fellow-sufferer brought news of a new kind of pill, compounded from literally over a hundred ingredients. He made quite a to-do about it and felt singularly alleviated: for what boulder could withstand the blows of such a numerous battering! Yet from those who assayed those pills I understand not even the tiniest grain of gravel deigned to be dislodged.

I cannot give up this piece of paper without saying just one more word about the way doctors guarantee the reliability of their cures by citing personal experience. The greater part (perhaps over two-thirds) of the virtues of medicines consists in the latent properties or the quintessences of simples; only practical usage can tell us about that, for quintessence is, precisely, a quality the cause of which our reason cannot explain.34

Those of their proofs which doctors say they owe to revelations from some daemon or other,35 I am content just to accept (I never touch miracles); the same goes for proofs based on things we use every day for other purposes – if for example they stumble on to some latent powers of desiccation in the wool we use to clothe us and then cure the blisters on our heels with it; or they may discover some aperient action in the horseradish we eat every day for [C] food. Galen gives an account [A] of a leper36 cured by drinking wine from a jar into which a viper had chanced to slip. That example shows how our experimental knowledge is likely to increase, as do those cures which doctors claim to have been put on to by the example of certain animals. But for most of the rest of the experimental knowledge to which they claim to have been guided by fortune or luck, I find it impossible to believe that they actually advanced their knowledge that way. I think of a doctor looking round at the infinite variety of matter: plants, animals, metals. What should he assay, to start with? I cannot tell. Supposing his thought first lights, say, on an elk’s horn – and one’s credulity must be soft and compliant to suppose that!37 His next task is equally difficult. He has to confront so many illnesses, so many attendant circumstances, that before he can advance to the point where his experiment reaches certainty the human intellect runs out of words. Before he can discover, among the infinite number of objects, what that horn actually is; then, among the infinite number of illnesses, what epilepsy actually is; then, from among all the complexions, identify melancholy, then, from all the seasons, winter; then, from so many peoples, the French; then, from so many stages of life, old age; then, from so many motions in the heavens, the conjunction of Venus and Saturn; then, from so many parts of the body, the finger: being guided in all that not by argument, not by conjecture, not by example, not by divine inspiration but only as moved by Fortuna: well, before all that can happen, he would need. Fortuna who was a perfect practitioner of the Art, with her rules and method.

And then, even if a cure is achieved, how can the doctor be certain that the malady had not simply run its course or that it was not a chance effect or produced by something else which the patient had eaten, drunk or touched that day – or by the merits of his grandmother’s prayers?

Furthermore, even if that proof were absolutely convincing, how many times was it repeated and how often was the doctor able to string such chance encounters together again, so as to establish a rule?38

[B] And if that rule is to be established, who does it? Only three men out of so many millions are concerned to keep records of their experiments. Did Chance happen to come across precisely one of those? Supposing another man – or a hundred men – make opposing experiments. Perhaps we could see a little light if all the judgements and reasonings of all men were known to us. But that three witnesses – three doctors – should make rules for the whole human race is not reasonable: for that to happen our human Nature would have to select them, depute them and then have them declared our Syndics, [C] by express letters of procuration.39

[A] TO MADAME DE DURAS.40

My Lady:

You caught me just at that point when you called to see me recently. Since these ineptitudes may fall into your hands one day I would also like them to testify that their author feels most honoured by the favour you will be doing them. In them you will find the same mannerisms and attitudes which you have known in your commerce with him. Even if I could have adopted some style other than my usual one or some form better or more honourable I would not have done so; I want nothing from these writings except that they should recall me to your memory as sketched from nature. I want to take those very same characteristics and attributes which you, My Lady, have known, welcoming them with more honour and courtesy than they deserve, and lodge them (without change or alteration) within some solid body which is able to outlive me by a few years – or a few days – in which you will be able to find them again, refreshing your memory of them whenever you want to, without having the burden of otherwise keeping them in mind (they would not be worth that). I desire that you will go on favouring me with your affection for the same qualities which first aroused it. I have no wish to be better loved or better valued when dead than when alive. [B] That humour of Tiberius which made him41 more concerned to be widely honoured in the future than to make himself esteemed or liked in his own day is ridiculous, though common enough. [C] If I were to one of those to whom the world may owe a debt of praise, I would rather be paid in advance, please, and wipe off the debt. Let praise rush to pile up round me, thickly not thinly spread, plentiful rather than long-lasting. Then, when its sweet voice can strike my ears no more, it can be bold enough to disappear with my own consciousness. [A] Now that I am ready to give up all commerce with men it would be an insane humour to parade myself before them decked in some new subject of esteem. I will not acknowledge any receipt for goods not delivered for use during my lifetime. Whatever I may be like, I have no desire to exist only on paper! My art and industry have been employed to make this self of mine worth something; my studies, to teach me not to write but to act. All my effort has gone into the forming of my life: that is my trade and vocation. Any other job is more for me than the scribbling of books. I have wanted merely to be clever enough for my present and essential comforts, not to store up a reserve for my heirs.

[C] If anyone is worth anything, let it appear in his behaviour, in his ordinary talk when loving or quarrelling, in his pastimes, in bed, at table, in the way he conducts his business and runs his house. Those men whom I see writing good books while wearing torn breeches would first mend their breeches if they took my advice. Ask a Spartan if he would rather be a good orator or a good soldier; why, I would rather be a good cook, if I did not have a fine one serving me already.

[A] Good God, My Lady, how I would hate the reputation of being clever at writing but stupid and useless at everything else! I would rather be stupid at both than to choose to employ my good qualities as badly as that. Far from expecting to acquire some new honour by this silly nonsense, I shall have achieved a lot if it does not make me lose the little I have. Leaving aside the fact that this dumb nature morte will be an impoverished portrait of my natural being, it is not even drawn from my state at its best but only after it has declined from its original joy and vigour, now seeming withered and rancid. I have reached the bottom of the barrel which readily stinks of lees and sediment.

Moreover I would never have dared, My Lady, to be bold at disturbing the mysteries of Medicine (seeing the trust that you and so many others place in her), if I had not been helped along by the medical authorities themselves. There are only two among the Latins: Pliny and Celsus. If you take a look at them sometime you will find that they treat Medicine more rudely than I do. I give her a pinch: they slit her gizzard. Among other things Pliny mocks doctors who, when they have come to the end of their tether, have found a fine way of ridding themselves of their patients after they have racked them with their potions and tormented them with their diets, all to no avail: they pack some of the sick off to be succoured by vows and miracles, and the rest of them to hot-spring resorts. (Do not be offended, My Lady: he did not mean the ones on our own mountain-slopes which are all under the protection of your family, all devoted to the Gramonts.)

Doctors have a third way42 of getting rid of us, driving us away and freeing themselves of the weight of our reproaches for the lack of improvement in our illnesses which they have been treating for so long that they can devise nothing new to spin out more time: they send us away to some other region to discover how good the air is there!

Enough of this, My Lady. You will allow me now to pick up the thread of my subject which I had digressed from in order to converse with you.

It was I think Pericles who was asked how he was getting on and replied, ‘You can tell from all this,’ pointing to the amulets tied to his neck and his arms. He wanted to imply that, since he had been reduced to having recourse to such silly things and to allow them to be used as protection, he was ill indeed.43

I do not mean that I may not one day be swept away by the ridiculous idea of entrusting my life to the mercy of the doctors and my health to their ordinances; I might well fall into such raving madness (I cannot vouch for my future constancy); but if I do, like, like Pericles I shall say to anyone who asks how I am, ‘You can tell from all this,’ showing him my palm burdened with six drams of opiate. That will be a manifest symptom of violent illness.44 My judgement will have miraculously flown off the handle. If fear and intolerance of pain ever make me do that, you may diagnose a very harsh fever in my soul.

I have bothered to plead this case (which I do not well understand) in order to lend a little support and reinforcement to that natural aversion for our medical drugs and practices which has been handed on to me by my ancestors, so that it should be more than some thoughtless, senseless tendency but an aversion with a little more form. I also want those who see me firmly set against the persuasions and menaces addressed to me when my afflictions oppress me not to take it for pure stubbornness nor be so hasty as to conclude that I am pricked on by vainglory. What a well-placed blow that would be, to wish to squeeze honour from a practice common to me, my gardener and my mule-driver!45 I certainly do not have a mind so distended and flatulent that I would go and swap a solid flesh-and-marrow joy like health for some fancied joy all wind and vapour. For a man of my humour even glory such as that of the Four Sons of Aymon is purchased too dear if the price is three good attacks of the stone. Health! For God’s sake!

Those who like our medicine may also have their own good, great, powerful arguments: I do not loathe ideas which go against my own. I am so far from shying away when others’ judgements clash with mine, so far from making myself unsympathetic to the companionship of men because they hold to other notions or parties, that, on the contrary, just as the most general style followed by Nature is variety – [C] even more in minds than in bodies, since minds are of a more malleable substance capable of accepting more forms – [A] I find it much rarer to see our humours and [C] purposes [A] coincide. In the whole world there has never been two identical opinions, any more than two identical [C] hairs or seeds. [A] Their most universal characteristic is diversity.46