Satire as Therapy

Abstract

Horace’s satires have often been called non- satirical, and Boethius’s Consolation has usually been taken as a serious philosophical work.¹ The same conclusions could be made about some of the early modern texts studied here, but in their case, I would argue, the conclusions would be false. Consolatory discourse, essayistic pondering on the good life, disease and suffering, and paradoxical subversion of expectations and values may not qualify as satirical features in themselves, even though Menippean satire was very fond of paradoxes. Rather these texts have many obvious similarities with Seneca’s and Cicero’s philosophical discussions, which they often quote, and even with elegiac poetry, although they often turn the elegiac lamentation around and advocate refusing pain and laughing at the seriousness of suffering in order to recognise the benefits of physical illnesses.

Analogismus equidem postremum locum inter alia Medici instru-menta habet, & magis quam experientia decipere potest. Interdum tamen ad eum necessario confugiendum, ubi scilicet nec ratione uti licet, atque illa, e quibus quid colligi debet, ignota & obstrusa sunt, nec experientia confirmari possunt, sed res plane nova est.

Analogy is the last tool the physician ought to use, and it is less reliable a source of knowledge than experience. However, at times we are forced to resort to it, namely, where reasoning fails or in such completely new cases where the causes of things are unknown and obscure and our experience does not shed enough light on the facts.

(Daniel Sennert, Institutionum medicinae libri V, p. 1069, De indicatione)