The Complete Essays (133 page)

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 me
³²
[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 leper
³⁶
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 him
⁴¹
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 way
⁴²
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!