“Mes ancestres avoient la medecine à contrecoeur” ‘My Ancestors had an Aversion to Medicine’: Medical Discourse, Observation, and Self-Portraiture

Abstract

In the Introduction to this study, we noted that adherence to the efficient style of the conte/nouvelle constrains the author as he faces the violence of the religious wars and seeks internal strength to buttress himself against the unpredictable events outside his estate. It is evident that the brief narrative tale appears as one form among others in the midst of an increasingly extended discourse. To the list of conte, propos de table, discours bigarrés, chronicles, and history, we would add medical diagnostic—the type of recounting and keeping track of habitual activities: eating, drinking, suffering bouts of illness that were typical of Renaissance medical discourse. Jean Starobinski, as translated by John A. Gallucci, comments on the irony of Montaigne’s reliance on a form of medical discourse in a work in which he berates the efficacy of medical practice, and in particular, their reliance on knowledge as distinct from experience: “The reader will notice (were he only to glance at the medical books of the time) that Montaigne cannot narrate his own being (se raconter) except by appropriating the language of the doctors, by making use of their categories, by diverting them according to the rule he applies to all of his borrowings, for his own benefit.”¹