On Heredity and Medical Skepticism — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne says his book is faggoted at leisure without second thoughts, each piece shown as it came from the forge, and by the liberality of years he has been acquainted with the stone, the disease he most dreaded from infancy.

He had fancied it insupportable, yet finds it more bearable than imagination promised when the soul is free from fear of death and from physic's menaces; pain may perfect what he could not resolve about death, though he dreads swinging between fearing and desiring the last day. Philosophy should govern understanding, not forbid sighs; he complains but does not roar, and tests himself in torment by setting remote discourse when visitors think him worst. Maecenas and Tamerlane show how men cling to miserable being rather than quit life, yet Montaigne still prefers neither to fear nor to wish the last day.

He marvels how a drop of seed carries bodily form and even inclinations of fathers across irregular generations; his father felt nothing till sixty-seven, yet Montaigne alone among many siblings inherited the malady decades later.

His ancestors lived long without physic; the antipathy is hereditary and fortified by reason, though he would have wrestled with mere instinct had reason not supported it. Crafty humility confesses ignorance in nature so others may trust what we claim to know; Montaigne finds incomprehensible wonders in ordinary seed without hunting foreign miracles.

Experience shows those who take much physic soonest sick and longest ill; physicians corrupt health, claim successes, blame rattling coaches, and lie at pleasure because health depends on vanity of promises. Cato helped banish medicine from Rome; country people still cure with strong wine and saffron while learned men die sooner than their patients.

Rome banished medicine six hundred years; purging may not be nature's aim; contradictory counsel makes every prescription a hazard. Herophilus, Hippocrates, Paracelsus, and a hundred schools overturn one another; who ever saw one physician approve another's without alteration? Surgery is more certain because it sees what it touches.

He has tried baths without miracle; Lahontan's happy valley was ruined when a notary taught lawsuits and a physician taught fevers. A goat bred for celestial blood already held stones in its paunch.

A letter to Madame de Duras interrupts: he paints his passage, not posterity's praise, refuses fame after death, and cites Pliny and Celsus harsher than he. Germans bathe all day, Italians drink nine days and scour with doccie streams; every nation contradicts the next while crowds still flock to waters that rarely harm and never work miracles.

A company once laughed at a pill of a hundred ingredients that could not stir one gravel atom; Montaigne mocks assurance from experiments no three witnesses could repeat. He may one day clutch opium like Pericles' scrolls, yet now pleads inherited skepticism with form, not obstinacy for glory.

He honours good physicians and hates only the art that usurps tyrannical authority over creatures weakened by sickness and fear. Fear and impatience make us acquiesce; cowardice bends belief. He mistrusts occult simples, professional quarrels, and experiments that could never be repeated across infinite variables; three physicians on his own diseases never agreed.

A gentleman cut for stone had none; a bishop opened after promised surgery carried kidney trouble only. Promises of physic route drugs by occult commission while dissentient prescriptions killed Etienne de la Boetie. Make water often, or not; bathe hot, or not; every rule has its contrary twin.

He will send for physicians for company and harmless orders, not submission; Lycurgus allowed wine to the sick Spartan who hated it in health. Pericles showed parchment amulets as proof he had fallen low; Montaigne may clutch opium with the same shame. There never were two opinions alike, no more than two hairs; their most universal quality is diversity.