The Complete Essays (130 page)

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.
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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.
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[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).
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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.
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[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.
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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,
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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.
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[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;]
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