Michel de Montaigne

“ In such extreme accidents, 'tis cruelty to require
so exact a composedness. 'Tis no great matter that we make a wry face,
if the mind plays its part well: if the body find itself relieved by
complaining let it complain: if agitation ease it, let it tumble and toss
at pleasure; if it seem to find the disease evaporate (as some physicians
hold that it helps women in delivery) in making loud outcries, or if this
do but divert its torments, let it roar as it will. ”

“ I know very well that I do nothing for them in so doing, because
sharpness and strangeness are incidents of the very essence of physic.
Lycurgus ordered wine for the sick Spartans. Why? because they
abominated the drinking it when they were well; as a gentleman, a
neighbour of mine, takes it as an excellent medicine in his fever,
because naturally he mortally hates the taste of it. How many do we see
amongst them of my humour, who despise taking physic themselves, are men
of a liberal diet, and live a quite contrary sort of life to what they
prescribe others? ”

“ What is this but flatly to abuse our simplicity? for
their own lives and health are no less dear to them than ours are to us,
and consequently they would accommodate their practice to their rules, if
they did not themselves know how false these are.
'Tis the fear of death and of pain, impatience of disease, and a violent
and indiscreet desire of a present cure, that so blind us: 'tis pure
cowardice that makes our belief so pliable and easy to be imposed upon:
and yet most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit ”

“ Men disturb and
irritate the disease by contrary oppositions; it must be the way of
living that must gently dissolve, and bring it to its end. The violent
gripings and contest betwixt the drug and the disease are ever to our
loss, since the combat is fought within ourselves, and that the drug is
an assistant not to be trusted, being in its own nature an enemy to our
health, and by trouble having only access into our condition. ”

“ I have, in that time, by the liberality of years, been
acquainted with the stone: their commerce and long converse do not well
pass away without some such inconvenience. I could have been glad that
of other infirmities age has to present long-lived men withal, it had
chosen some one that would have been more welcome to me, for it could not
possibly have laid upon me a disease for which, even from my infancy, I
have had so great a horror; and it is, in truth, of all the accidents of
old age, that of which I have ever been most afraid. ”

“ No Roman till Pliny's time
had ever vouchsafed to practise physic; that office was only performed
by Greeks and foreigners, as 'tis now amongst us French, by those who
sputter Latin; for, as a very great physician says, we do not easily
accept the medicine we understand, no more than we do the drugs we
ourselves gather. If the nations whence we fetch our guaiacum,
sarsaparilla, and China wood, have physicians, how great a value must we
imagine, by the same recommendation of strangeness, rarity, and dear
purchase, do they set upon our cabbage and parsley? ”

“ There is a certain friend of
theirs,— [Celsus, Preface to the First Book.] —whom they know better
than I, who declares upon this subject, "that the most important science
in practice amongst us, as that which is intrusted with our health and
conservation, is, by ill luck, the most uncertain, the most perplexed,
and agitated with the greatest mutations." ”

“ Plato said very well, that physicians
were the only men who might lie at pleasure, since our health depends
upon the vanity and falsity of their promises.
AEsop, a most excellent author, and of whom few men discover all the
graces, pleasantly represents to us the tyrannical authority physicians
usurp over poor creatures, weakened and subdued by sickness and fear,
when he tells us, that a sick person, being asked by his physician what
operation he found of the potion he had given him: "I have sweated very
much," says the sick man. "That's good," says the physician. ”

“ Let it
alone a little; the general order of things that takes care of fleas and
moles, also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that
fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself. 'Tis to much purpose we cry
out "Bihore,"— [A term used by the Languedoc waggoners to hasten their
horses] —'tis a way to make us hoarse, but not to hasten the matter.
'Tis a proud and uncompassionate order: our fears, our despair displease
and stop it from, instead of inviting it to, our relief; it owes its
course to the disease, as well as to health ”

“ Order a purge for your
brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.
One asking a Lacedaemonian what had made him live so long, he made
answer, "the ignorance of physic"; and the Emperor Adrian continually
exclaimed as he was dying, that the crowd of physicians had killed him.
A bad wrestler turned physician: "Courage," says Diogenes to him; "thou
hast done well, for now thou will throw those who have formerly thrown
thee." But they have this advantage, according to Nicocles, that the sun
gives light to their success and the earth covers their failures. ”

“ As to what remains, I honour physicians, not according to the precept
for their necessity (for to this passage may be opposed another of the
prophet reproving King Asa for having recourse to a physician) , but for
themselves, having known many very good men of that profession, and most
worthy to be beloved. I do not attack them; 'tis their art I inveigh
against, and do not much blame them for making their advantage of our
folly, for most men do the same. ”

“ All means that conduce to health can neither be too painful
nor too dear to me. But I have some other appearances that make me
strangely suspect all this merchandise. I do not deny but that there may
be some art in it, that there are not amongst so many works of Nature,
things proper for the conservation of health: that is most certain: I
very well know there are some simples that moisten, and others that dry;
I experimentally know that radishes are windy, and senna-leaves purging ”

“ We do little better; there is not so
simple a woman, whose gossips and drenches we do not make use of: and
according to my humour, if I were to take physic, I would sooner choose
to take theirs than any other, because at least, if they do no good, they
will do no harm. What Homer and Plato said of the Egyptians, that they
were all physicians, may be said of all nations; there is not a man
amongst any of them who does not boast of some rare recipe, and who will
not venture it upon his neighbour, if he will let him. ”

“ Ours are not aware that he who provides for all, provides for nothing;
and that the entire government of this microcosm is more than they are
able to undertake. Whilst they were afraid of stopping a dysentery, lest
they should put the patient into a fever, they killed me a friend,
— [Estienne de la Boetie.] —who was worth more than the whole of them.
They counterpoise their own divinations with the present evils; and
because they will not cure the brain to the prejudice of the stomach,
they injure both with their dissentient and tumultuary drugs. ”

“ Human things are not usually so constant; it has been two
hundred years, save eighteen, that this trial has lasted, for the first
of them was born in the year 1402: 'tis now, indeed, very good reason
that this experience should begin to fail us. Let them not, therefore,
reproach me with the infirmities under which I now suffer; is it not
enough that I for my part have lived seven-and-forty years in good
health? though it should be the end of my career; 'tis of the longer
sort.
My ancestors had an aversion to physic by some occult and natural
instinct ”

“ I find, by inquiry of people accustomed to open these animals, that it is
a rare and unusual accident. 'Tis likely these are stones of the same
nature with ours and if so, it must needs be a very vain hope in
those who have the stone, to extract their cure from the blood of a beast
that was himself about to die of the same disease. ”

“ They are least excusable for any error in this disease, by
reason that it is in some sort palpable; and 'tis thence that I conclude
surgery to be much more certain, by reason that it sees and feels what it
does, and so goes less upon conjecture; whereas the physicians have no
'speculum matricis', by which to examine our brains, lungs, and liver.
Even the very promises of physic are incredible in themselves ”

“ In such proofs, those they pretend to have acquired
by the inspiration of some daemon, I am content to receive (for I meddle
not with miracles) ; and also the proofs which are drawn from things that,
upon some other account, often fall into use amongst us; as if in the
wool, wherewith we are wont to clothe ourselves, there has accidentally
some occult desiccative property been found out of curing kibed heels, or
as if in the radish we eat for food there has been found out some
aperitive operation. ”

“ Those whom I see make good
books in ill breeches, should first have mended their breeches, if they
would have been ruled by me. Ask a Spartan whether he had rather be a
good orator or a good soldier: and if I was asked the same question, I
would rather choose to be a good cook, had I not one already to serve me. ”

“ Let her
allow this vocal frailty to disease, if it be neither cordial nor
stomachic, and permit the ordinary ways of expressing grief by sighs,
sobs, palpitations, and turning pale, that nature has put out of our
power ”

“ Seigneur de Gaviac, my uncle by the father's side, a churchman, and a
valetudinary from his birth, and yet who made that crazy life hold out to
sixty-seven years, being once fallen into a furious fever, it was ordered
by the physicians he should be plainly told that if he would not make use
of help (for so they call that which is very often an obstacle) , he would
infallibly be a dead man. ”

“ They have the like uniformity in the
counsels they give us for the regimen of life: it is good to make water
often; for we experimentally see that, in letting it lie long in the
bladder, we give it time to settle the sediment, which will concrete into
a stone; it is good not to make water often, for the heavy excrements it
carries along with it will not be voided without violence, as we see by
experience that a torrent that runs with force washes the ground it rolls
over much cleaner than the course of a slow and tardy stream ”