Montaigne compiles the essays only in idle time, and never anywhere but at home, after interruptions that sometimes keep him many months elsewhere. He never corrects first conceptions by second thoughts, except to vary a phrase, because he wants the progress of his humours shown, each piece as it came from the forge. A servant employed to transcribe stole the pieces he liked best; Montaigne's comfort is that the thief will be no greater gainer than he is a loser. He has grown older by seven or eight years since he began, and by the liberality of years has been acquainted with the stone, the disease he most dreaded from infancy. He had fancied it insupportable. After about eighteen months he has inured himself to live on in it, and finds the pain more bearable than imagination promised, provided the soul is free from the fear of death and from the menaces physic is ever thundering. The stone may perfect the acquaintance with death he could not resolve upon, though he still dreads swinging from fearing the last day to wishing it. Philosophy should govern the understanding, not a ceremonious face; she forms us to be, not to seem. Maecenas would keep life even as a cripple; Tamerlane's lepers would rather be thrice lepers than not be; Antisthenes wanted delivery from sufferings, not from life, when Diogenes offered a knife. Montaigne is very sensible of corporeal pains, yet will not let them put a man of understanding into rage. Then the hereditary wonder: a drop of seed carries not only bodily form but thoughts and inclinations of fathers, by a process so irregular that a son may resemble a great-grandfather. In the family of Lepidus at Rome, three were born, at intervals, with the same eye covered with a cartilage.
He believes he derives the stone from his father, who felt nothing till sixty-seven, then died tormented after seven painful years. Montaigne was born in the father's flourishing health, about five-and-twenty years before the disease seized him, and did not begin to feel it till five-and-forty, the only one among many brothers and sisters ever troubled with it. The antipathy to physic is hereditary. Father, grandfather, and great-grandfather lived long without tasting any drug. Seigneur de Gaviac, told he would be a dead man without help, answered that he was then a dead man, and the prognostic proved false. Sieur de Bussaguet, the only brother who used medicine, died long before the rest. Montaigne would have wrestled with a mere instinct; he has fortified the aversion by reasons. He honours health and Nature's simples, radishes, senna, mutton, wine, and mistrusts the inventions of mind that abandon Nature's rules. Those who take much physic are soonest sick and longest ill; physicians will corrupt health itself lest men escape their authority. The Romans went six hundred years without the art, then banished it at Cato the Censor's instance. Plato taught him that of three natural motions, purging is the worst. Nature's order takes care of fleas and moles, and will drag those who will not follow, fury and physic together. A Lacedaemonian credited long life to ignorance of physic. Adrian dying cried that the crowd of physicians had killed him. Nicocles said the art's authority is that it can kill with impunity; the sun lights success and the earth covers failures. Paracelsus, Fioravanti, and Argentier overturn not a recipe but the whole body of physic. The poor patient is left under mutations entire and universal.
Aesop's buyer bathes a Moor to amend complexion and only ruins his health. After a deadly epidemic, a famous physician confessed that letting blood had been the principal cause. Montaigne never found three of one opinion on his own diseases. A gentleman at Paris was cut for the stone and had none; a bishop, pressed by physicians and by Montaigne, was opened after death and had only kidney trouble. Surgery sees what it touches; physic sends ingredients on occult errands as if they would not lose their tickets in the mixture. Whilst they were afraid of stopping a dysentery lest they raise a fever, they killed Etienne de la Boetie, worth more than the whole of them. Aperitive medicines, frequent water, and women are each prescribed and forbidden in the same breath. Montaigne has tried baths without miracle; reports of extraordinary effects proved ill-grounded. He chooses pleasant waters: Bagneres, Plombieres, Baden, Lucca, Della Villa. Germans bathe from sun to sun; Italians drink nine days. At Lahontan, a little state that had never retained an advocate, a village notary taught lawsuits over a goat's horns, and a physician then taught the names of fevers and cut lives shorter by the half. Before the stone, Montaigne had a he-goat fed on aperitive herbs for celestial blood. The cook found three sponge-light lumps already in the paunch. It is vain to extract a cure from a beast dying of the same disease. He honours good physicians and inveighs against the art; when sick he sends for them for company and indifferent orders, as Lycurgus ordered wine for Spartans who hated it in health. Fear of death and of pain makes belief pliable. A company laughed at pills of a hundred ingredients that could not stir one gravel atom.
He will not take his hand from the paper before adding that most medicinal virtues are occult quintessence, of which we have no instruction but use. After a cure, who can say it was not the disease's period, chance, or a grandmother's prayers? Three doctors should not lord it over mankind. He writes to Madame de Duras, who found him at work upon this chapter, that these trifles should present him as he naturally is. He is not ambitious to be loved more dead than living; Tiberius is ridiculous for courting posterity over the living. He is less a writer of books than anything else; those who make good books in ill breeches should first have mended the breeches. Pliny and Celsus cut the art's throat harder than he pinches it, and send failed patients to vows, baths, or some other country's air. Pericles, asked how he did, showed parchment amulets tied about him as proof he had fallen to fopperies. Montaigne dares not promise constancy; he may one day clutch six drachms of opium and answer as Pericles did. He pleads the inherited aversion with form, not for glory; he will not exchange health for the fame of the Four Sons of Aymon if it cost three swinging fits of the stone. Give him health. He does not hate contrary opinions. There never were two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity.
