THE DOCTOR'S ESSAYIST: MICHEL HE MONTAIGNE.

H. S. CARTER, m.d., d.p.h.

Sydenham, asked by one starting the study of medicine what books he should read, answered Don Quixote, meaning, said Osier, that the only book of physic worth permanent study is the book of Nature. Osier himself, a modern Sydenham, would probably have suggested Religio Medici or Montaigne's Essais. In his bedside library for the student he placed all three, whose authors have this in common, that they surveyed the human spectacle and mankind's stupidity with sterling unwinking commonsense and a full measure of that aequanimitas which Osier regarded as such a desirable constituent of the philosophy of a doctor. But really none of these books is a young man's book ; they are books that we come to when we are older, especially Montaigne. Montaigne, whom Madame de Sevigue thought such capital company, displays this urbane, sceptical, discursive matter-of-factness to the greatest degree, and the instantly ' ' famous that he wrote in his backshop contain much that bears directly and indirectly on medicine and on matters interesting to medical men.

Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne, was a man of the ; a Gascon and a Jew. His grandfather was a seller of dried fish and of wine; his father a wine-merchant, and his mother a Protestant of Jewish blood from Spain. There were physicians among his maternal ancestors. It is jnst possible that he had a trace ot English blood in him derived from the days of the occupation of Guienne. He was born in 1533 on the estate near that gave him his name, when was at war with the Hapsburgs ; and his life stretched through the time of the civil wars of religion between Huguenots and Catholics, through that exciting period depicted by Dumas in his Valois romances, the times of Charles IX, Henri III and Henri IV : when Chicot jested and intrigued, and on occasion flashed his long sword against great odds ; when Bussy d Aniboise, swashbuckling exquisite, fought and died in epic style ; and Brantome, an abbe at sixteen, was hanging round the Court amassing that celebrated collection of scandalous anecdotes of the boudoir contained ' 111 his Vies des Dames (ialantes.' Medicine at this time was represented by great names. Ambroise Pare (1530-90), who reformed military surgery ; Jerome Cardan (1501-70), ?ne of the great Renaissance doctors who visited Edinburgh in 1552 ; Jean Kernel (1497-1558), the subject of Sir Charles Sherrington's later 409 410 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

studies, who was the leading physician in Paris in 1550, and adviser of Catherine de' Medici ; John Caius, who in England was studying the ' ' sweating sickness and re-founding a college ; and others whose names are signposts in the history of medicine, but whose practice was conducted with little light and less imagination. The essayist's early education was peculiar. He prattled in , and spoke practically no French until he was six;. He knew more Latin than his masters when he went to the College of Guienne. He was awakened each morning by music because his dilettante father had an idea that the infant brain should not be jarred by rude shocks. Montaigne says he was not brilliant at school and had a slow and inert mind. He seems to have worked a lot at home with tutors, including that learned old Scottish historian and scholar, . Little is known about his early manhood except that he probably studied law at Toulouse and about the age of twenty-four formed his famous friendship with Etienne de la Boetie the poet, a minor follower of Ronsard and one of the small fry of the Pleiade movement. In his young days la Boetie was a rebel who wrote a pamphlet against monarchy which achieved notoriety. He lives only by his acquaintance with Montaigne, but his early death affected Montaigne profoundly and coloured his whole life. Montaigne watched at his friend's death bed trying to resolve his perplexities and afterwards described the episode with painful clarity, the event having cut into his memory with intaglio depth and sharpness. He was never able to forget this death and Boetie's approach to it. Boetie was Montaigne's Arthur Hallam, who, if he did not inspire a poem, inspired eloquent writing on friendship. After Boetie's death Montaigne gave ' himself up to amusement for a year or two ; but, as he said, did not venture far from home,' even in his more questionable distractions. At some time in his early years Montaigne probably served in one or more campaigns. He was a Councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux as early as 1554 and later in life was Mayor of Bordeaux. In 1585, during his mayoralty, plague attacked the city, and in a few months killed more than a quarter of the population. Montaigne's antidotes seem to have been resolution and patience, but he noticed the evil effects of fear. He is said to have kept out of the city as far as possible during the pestilence. Although he had little to do with the Court and probably thought ' himself fortunate therein, he was styled gentleman in ordinary to the ' King and enjoyed considerable social standing. He was friendly with Henri III who made him a Knight of St. Michael, and with Henri Quatre who twice stayed and hunted at Montaigne's chateau. Montaigne was nobody's fool and though at times embarrased by opposite sides claiming his allegiance, managed to steer clear of trouble with rival factions while walking a little way with both on occasions. He never MONTAIGNE?CARTER 411

' lost touch. He knew men. He was a hedonist, leaned to the sunny side,' and made his way safely. All the same, late in life, in 1588 he was in Paris when that town was temporarily deserted by the King in his struggle with the Iyigue, and was clapped in the Bastille by Guise and his partisans ; when he had gout in his left foot too, as if that was not enough. However, he was promptly and fittingly released by order of Catherine de' Medici, that wickedly clever but perhaps too much maligned woman. Earlier, when travelling in search of health, he had earnestly sought the citizenship of Rome which was then conferred by Papal Bull. He got it, and printed the text of the proclamation in his essays. But why did he desire it so much ? Was it because he was so much soaked in the Latin that he wished to be able to say Civis Romanus sum ? It is said he left Rome complaining there were too many Frenchmen there. Montaigne, when he was thirty-three, married Fran^oise de Chassaigne. It appears to have been a satisfactory marriage on the whole, but whether the lady found it so may be doubted. ' A man does not marry for himself, whatever say ; he marries people ' quite as much, if not more, for his posterity and his family . Marriage meaneth a kind of converse which cooleth, easily' through propinquity?a converse which is harmed by assiduity.' A happy marriage, if there be such, rejecteth the company and conditions of love.' None the less, he had six children, all girls, only one of whom, L,eonora, achieved womanhood. Montaigne, within three years, lost much affection for his domestic scene, and retired to the country of the mind. Madame Montaigne probably had a dull time, but she managed the estate and evidently had a reasonably free hand. According to her husband one of ' her hobbies was doctoring the villagers with a store of paltry drugs and medicines ; she used the same medicine for fifty different maladies.' At any rate Montaigne determined to retire on his thirty-eighth birthday. So on one side of his house, which he had inherited from his father, he built his famous tower as a refuge for his soul. He must have been an exasperating man to live with, for he could never remember how many ' children he had had, and even wrote : I have never thought that to be without children was a lack which would make life less complete and contented. The vocation of sterility certainly has its advantages.' The tower that he built on to his house in the little sun-baked rambling old village in the land of peach-blossom and wine, had on the ground-floor a chapel, so that its owner could hear mass while lying in for the chamber above. Higher up was his famous library, large those days, of more than a thousand books : the best sort of country library, the he calls it ; where he meditated the years away and wrote epoch- ttiaking essays. He has described his library. ' is 110 more wall than what The figure of my study is round, and there open so that all the of the is taken up by my table and my chair, remaining parts circle present me a view of all my books at once, ranged upon five rows of shelves round about me. It has three noble and free prospects and is sixteen paces in diameter.' 412 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

The library walls were adorned with musical instruments, and the rafters covered with quotations from the Bible and the classics, such as ' ' Be not wise above that which is usual, but be soberly wise,' and I ' suspend judgment ; I examine,' and It may be, and it may not be.' The nucleus of his library was left him by La Boetie, and the remainder, largely classical, included the of his time. He certainly had Caesar's Commentaries, , , Rabelais, , Lucan and Tacitus among others, for he quotes all of them and many more besides. Plutarch was his great stand-by, and Virgil enthralled him. So at the age of thirty-eight, as he says, he betook himself to the bosom of the learned virgins, there to pass what little time remained to him in the ' retreat consecrated to freedom, tranquility and leisure.' Even when ruminating in his tower he felt the need for movement. ' My thoughts sleep if I sit still; my fancy does not go by itself as when my legs move it'. It is said that Mr. Churchill finds the same. Montaigne published the first two volumes of his essays in 1580 and added a third, written after his return from his journey in search of health (1580-81), in the Armada year, 1588. More than seventeen years brooding over his books, travelling in his mind and meditating on ' mortality and the tears in things,' went to the making of his work. The third volume is coloured by his sufferings from stone, and there is much in it of a more mellow philosophy, tempered in the tires of experience and endurance, attractive and interesting to medical minds. Montaigne makes a strong appeal to doctors because of the spirit of enquiry with which he was imbued, and for his painstaking analysis of the stupidities and foibles of mankind. He was an acute observer with insatiable curiosity, and had a mode of thought free and independent, with a wide spirit of toleration, which brought him to his own conclusions irrespective of the bias of the thought of his time. He wrote forthrightly but with modesty ; with a quaint lightness of touch, joined to a curious purposeful naivete which is fascinating. His study was mankind and himself in particular. ' Whoever should bundle up a lusty faggot of the fooleries of human wisdom, would produce wonders.' He is very discursive and follows all side-tracks with enthusiasm. No one followed for so long with such garrulous pleasure roads that lead nowhere in particular. He constantly exhibits himself and his affairs with charming egotism and always manages to surround his work with an atmosphere of scholarly scepticism which is entirely his own. Montaigne's habits and ailments. He describes himself as being below ' middle height, a defect which, he quaintly adds, not only borders on deformity but carries withal a good deal of inconvenience along with it, especially for those who are in office or command.' He was of sedentary habit, MONT A1GNE- C.I RTEIl 413

' I bestir myself with great difficulty and am slow in everything, whether in rising, going to bed or eating : seven o'clock in the morning is early for me; and where I rule I never dine before eleven, nor sup till after six.' He liked eight or nine hours' sleep, but never slept in the daytime, and never had his bed warmed, although when he was old, he had warm cloths to his feet and stomach. He liked a hard bed and preferred to lie ' alone, even without my wife, as Kings do.' When he rested he liked to elevate his legs. No athlete as his father was, he refers to himself as inept, but he seems to have enjoyed his limitations. Games and bodily exercises had no interest for him and he had no aptitude for any except horse-riding which was his favourite exercise, even when in pain. He did not mind dining without a table-cloth, but he did like a napkin, because he sought little help from spoon or fork, but ate mostly with his lingers. ' I hardly ever choose any dish at table, but take the next at hand and unwillingly change it for another. A confusion of meats and a clutter of dishes displease me as much as any other confusion. I usually eat salt meat and yet I love bread without salt .... I am not very fond of salads or fruit except melons .... Eating too much hurts me, but as to the quality of what I eat I do not yet certainly know that any sort of meat disagrees with my stomach . . . I am a great lover of fish.' Montaigne seldom drank more than three half-pints at a time, generally diluted wine. After meals he liked to rest and hear other people talk, for he found he grew tired if he talked on a full stomach, though he found shouting and arguing before a meal encouraged appetite. He ate rapidly and nervously. It is most unseemly besides being injurious to gobble as I do, I often bite my tongue, sometimes my fingers from sheer haste .... In my hurry I lose leisure for talk .... that pleasant seasoning of a dinner table.' He cleaned his teeth frequently and believing that a handkerchief was insanitary he commended blowing the nose without one. Some of his foibles must be rather exaggerated 111 his writings, for although he complains loudly of his mediocrity and laments absence of mind, he forgets none of his little idiosyncracies and habits, and records them all with singular /.est. Like Dr. Johnson he owned a cat, and when playing with it could not be sure whether he was making use of the cat, or the cat making use of him. Montaigne talked freely about his ailments, and called a spade a spade. His chief trouble, like Pepvs', was stone. ' I have suffered colds, gouty defluxions, relaxations, palpitations of the heart, meagrims and other accidents . . . .' He was proud of tlieni, ' The gout, the stone and indigestion are all symptoms of long years as heat, rains and wind of long voyages.' He refers to the ' stone, I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases ; I have already had the trial of five or six and fits.' ' very long painful Even this state is very well to be endured by a man who has his soul free from the fear of death.' Ivithiasis began to trouble him when he was about forty-five, and he ' believed that he had inherited it from his father, who died wonderfully 414 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

tormented with a great stone in his bladder,' which had troubled him for seven years. Montaigne was the third child and was born when his father was in his prime and long before he had developed stone. ' What a wonderful thing it is that the drop of seed from which we are produced should carry in itself the impressions, not only of the bodily form, but even of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers.' His meditations show genetics not to be so new a science after all. He was always wondering : Que s^ais-je ? was his motto. It is not clear whether Montaigne had at any time a large stone in his bladder. Stones regularly descended from his kidneys and he was much troubled with gravel. It is amazing how he put up with renal colic even when travelling on horseback. Vividly he describes a typical attack.

' Thou are seen to sweat with pain, to look pale and red, to tremble, to vomit well-nigh to blood, to suffer strange contortions and convulsions, by starts to let tears drop from thine eyes, to urine thick, black and frightful water, or to have it suppressed by some sharp and craggy stone, that cruelly pricks and tears thee." By 1580 he was so ill that after the publication of his first two volumes he set out to try various watering-places in an effort to get relief for his gout and nephrolithiasis. He travelled for seventeen months through France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy, reaching the famous baths of Iyiicca and making two long stays there. The manuscript of his travel-journal was unearthed nearly two hundred years after his death and makes rather rambling reading, but it is evident that despite the agonies he must have undergone this man of forty-seven took the keenest interest in life and all about him. He grumbled mightily. The arrogance of the Germans annoyed him, and the hostelries came in for a share of his complaints. He rode up to thirty miles a day 011 horseback, often suffering as he rode from renal colic varying in severity from diffuse aches to lancinating pain. At times he could feel the stones making their way down his ureters, and passed a good many during his journeyings. One, he notes, was shaped like a pine-kernel ; one which he passed 011 the Puy de Dome, broad and flat. He endured the disease at its greatest fury for ten hours together 011 horseback. He often suffered from head- aches, pains in his eyes, indigestion, nausea and much flatulence. Tooth- ache also afflicted him ; and sometimes the treatment made him sick. He must have passed almost a dozen stones, large and small, while on the trip. At Venice they were large and there was much gravel. He had haematuria before and after extruding some stones. Also he had jaundice. Yet he commented at length upon the baths and treatments prescribed and usually did not follow the doctors' advice, drinking the waters and bathing according to his own notions. At lvucca he had to take clysters of oil and anise water to ease intestinal distension. He was given pills of Venice turpentine and observed that this gave an odour of violets to his urine if it did nothing else. MONTAIGNE?CA RTlllt 415

' He was in Italy when Venice was still a boast, a marvel and a show.' He dined with the Dnke (Francois de' Medicis) and his wife, that intelli- gent intriguer Bianca Capella ; and in Rome he was much interested in the courtesans and complained that their conversation, which was what he wanted, was as expensive as their more intimate favours. Naturally he had something to say about cutting for the stone, but it seems doubtful if he ever needed lithotomy. Pare, the greatest surgeon alive at that time, did not do the operation, though Montaigne could have consulted him in Paris. The most noted of the itinerant lithoto- mists, who worked at Bale and elsewhere, was Pierre Franco, but Montaigne does not mention him. He did, however, early in his travels, consult Felix Platter at Bale. But lie remained rather sceptical about cutting for the stone 011 the experiences of his friends, and being cautious, preferred to carry 011, though it is at least doubtful if a man with much of a stone in his bladder would have been able to jog over Europe 011 horseback week after week. There are two curious quotations apropos his complaint. He had just sufiered from suppression of urine. ' Oh, that good Emperor who caused criminals to be tied that they might die for want of urination, was a great master of the hangman's science.' Oh, what a pity it is I have not the faculty of that dreamer in , who dreaming he was lying with a wench, found he had discharged his stone in the sheets ! My pains strangely disappetite me that way.' He quotes Pliny to the effect that stone in the bladder, when the urine is suppressed, gives a man good title to destroy himself. For his part he would prefer to poison himself with vSocrates than stab himself with Cato. But towards the end of his life, he boasts that he can hold his water ten hours, as long as any man in perfect health. to old It is for my good to have the stone. I therein pay what is due age and I cannot expect a better bargain.' Once or twice Montaigne complains of his eyesight, but his distant vision never failed. Reading sometimes wearied his eyes. Hypermetropia has He been suggested, but he may have developed presbyopia early. never had spectacles and read and wrote (in his crabbed hand) to the a of end. When he was fifty-four he records that he used to lay piece because it dulled glass on his book and found his eyes relieved thereby, the whiteness of the paper. his man He had a bad accident once when he was ridden down by to been killed. mounted 011 a heavy unruly horse, and was thought have of his He seems to have been 110 worse tor it, but his description sensations 1Ji his swooning state is masterly. ()f scratching he remarks that it is a pleasure. ' One of nature's sweetest gratifications?but the smart follows too near. 1 to itch. use it most in my ears which are often apt tte disclaims ever having had the itch, but ileas and lice must have been 410 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL common enough. Perhaps he had gouty eczema or some sort of pruritus. It is to be remembered he lived in an age when ladies and gentlemen scratched in public.

Montaigne on Doctors and Medicine. Although Montaigne wrote ' much that is attractive to medical readers, he was, as Osier said, rather hard on the doctors.' In the end he made it plain that it was their calling and not they that offended him ; the state of medicine in his time had little defence against his enquiring mind and quick eye. ' Why do physicians possess beforehand their patients' credulity with so many false promises of cure, if not to the end, that the effect of imagination may supply the imposture of their concoctions ? They know very well that a great master of their trade has given it ... . that he has known some with whom the very sight of physic would work.' This is followed by the stories of a valetudinarian afflicted with the stone and much addicted to clysters, who was as much benefited by the pretence of their being administered with all ceremony and the syringe advanced, as he was when they were actually given ; and of the lady who thought she had swallowed a pin and who was cured by her doctor who made her vomit and in the excitement quietly dropped a pin in the bowl. Such stories naturally lead him to the effects of imagination and to the statement that tortoises and ostriches hatch their eggs by looking at ' them, their eyes have in them some ejaculative .' This is the real Montaigne on one of his side tracks. But he professed an aversion to doctors in their practice, an antipathy ' which he regarded as hereditary, whereby he had received a hatred and contempt of their doctrine.' His ancestors had an aversion to physic ' by some occult and natural instinct, for the very sight of a potion was loathsome to my father.' ' My uncle, a churchman, a valetudinarian from birth, and yet who had 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 quite he would be a dead man. The man, terrified, contrary), " infallibly good though yet replied, I am then a dead man." .... Hut God soon after made the prognostic false.' And again : " Physicians are not content to deal only with the sick, but they will moreover corrupt health itself, for fear men should at any time escape their authority. Do they not from a continual and perfect health, extract suspicion of some great sickness to ensue ? We still hear of the doctor who seeks approval by exaggeration of the severity of an illness, so as to play for safety in any eventuality. Of doctors' prescriptions he is truly scornful. ' Nay even the very choice of most of their drugs is some sort mysterious and divine ; the left foot of a tortoise, the urine of a lizard, the clung of an elephant, the liver of a mole, the blood drawn from under the right wing of a pigeon ; and for us who have the stone .... the excrement of rats beaten to powder, and such like trash and fooleries which rather carry a face of magical enchantment than any solid science. A man must be marvellously blind not ' to see that he runs a very great hazard in their hands.' How often do we see physicians impute the death of their patients to one another.' MONTAIGNE?CARTER 417

Then he says he will omit the odd number of their pills and superstitions of days and seasons, for the art of physic is not fixed, he notices, but changes with the climates and moons, according to Kernel and Scaliger, physicians to Henri II. However, after due cogitation and despite what he knew of it, he deemed surgery ahead of medicine at that time. ' I conclude surgery to be much more certain by reason that it sees and feels what it does ; whereas the physicians have 110 speculum matricis by which to examine our brains, lungs and liver.' ' He held that the art of physic generally could not stand upon its own legs and whose foundations are too weak to support itself upon its own basis.' The surgeon need not boast of his cures unless he has drawn conclusions and the appropriate lesson. ' The fruit of a surgeon's experience is not the history of his practice, and his remembering that he has cured four people of the plague and three of gout, unless he knows how thence to extract something whereon to form his judgment and to make us sensible that he is thence become more skilful in his art.' He is sardonic about medicines.

' When I am sick, instead of recanting .... I begin to hate an 1 fear it, telling them who importune me to take physic that at all events they must give me time to recover my health and strength, that I may be the better able to support and encounter the violence and danger of their potions.' He quotes with relish, ' A physician takes no pleasure in the health even of his friends.' During liis intermittent diatribe against medicine he borrows many illustrations from its institutes and often refers to classical authorities for parallels and comparisons from the medical practice of the ancients. From Hierophilus to Hippocrates he quotes opinions on the original causes of disease. He seems to know a good deal of the history of medicine before his own time and notices discrepancies in the recommendations of the older practitioners, and in his disgust at the credulity of all, cries, ' Order a purge for your brain, it will be much better employed than upon ' your stomach.' Whoever saw one physician approve of another's prescription without taking something away or adding something to it ? Old Montaigne's strictures on medicine and the doctors, though profuse, shrewd and hard-hitting, are not malicious. ' When I am sick I send for them if they be near, only to have their company and pay them as others do. I give them leave to command me to keep myself warm, because I naturally love to do it, and to appoint leeks and lettuce for my broth ; to order me white wine or claret.' In the end he is generous. ' As to what remains I honour physicians not according to the precept for their necessity, but for themselves, having known many very good men of that profession and most worthy to be loved. 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.'

Montaigne s cariosity. Montaigne was full of curiosity, and though he has come down the years as the recluse of his tower he never failed to record anything unusual that came his way, and the stranger the better. He was a born observer and would have made a good doctor. Yet 418 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL perhaps he would have stood apart and decided to abide by that test of ' ' the civilized, to add no yapping to the spectacle ; looking on at the foibles and follies of mankind in a temper of detached curiosity. Like Pepys he encountered a monstrous child whose relatives showed it round the country for profit, and describes it in detail. It was fourteen months old and still suckling.

' Under the breast it was joined by another child but without a head and that had the spine of the back without motion, the rest entire. they were joined breast to breast, as if a lesser child would reach the arms about the neck of something bigger .... arms, buttocks, thighs and legs hung dangling upon the other and might reach to mid-leg. The nurse moreover told us it urined at both bodies.'

And so on. He devoted a short to it. On his travels he witnessed a ritual circumcision and describes the ceremony, including the operation, at some length and in full detail. He ran across some Flagellants, those strange followers of St. Anthony of Padua, and reports the spectacle as ' the most striking sight I ever saw.' Middle meningeal haemorrhage seems to have come under his observation, for he chronicles the case of a young man who in a tennis match received a blow from a hard-hit ball a little above the right ear. ' Which as it gave no manner of sign of wound or contusion, he took no notice of it, nor so much as sat down to repose himself, but nevertheless died within five or six hours after, of an apoplexy occasioned by the blow.' He writes of infection and immunity : ' As an infected body communicates its malady to those that approach or live near it, as we see in the plague, smallpox and sore eyes that run through whole famiies and cities.' ' I have found myself little subject to epidemic diseases, that are caught either by conversing with the sick or bred by the contagion of the air, and have escaped from those of my time, of which there have been several sorts in our cities and armies.' It sound surprisingly modern. Of odours he notes how they cling to his moustachios?' for if I stroke them with my gloves, the smell will not ' out a whole day ! Perfumed gloves were used in those days as were pomander boxes later, as protection against noxious odours. Montaigne thought the duration of human gestation eleven months.

' I, for my part, by example of myself, side with those who maintain that a woman goes eleven months with child.' ' There is not so simple a little woman that cannot give her judgment in all these controversies, and yet we cannot agree.' He mentions an old custom of Marseilles where a preparation of hemlock was kept at the public expense as a convenient means of euthanasia for those who first obtained a magistrate's permission and could produce ' ' good reasons for wanting to quit this vale of tears. He noticed allergic manifestations, strange constitutions ; people who vomit at the sight of cream ; who swoon at the sight of a cat. He thinks there may be some occult cause for these idiosyncrasies but is wise enough to conjecture that a man might conquer them. MONTAIGNE?CARTER 419

A fellow without arms came to the tower to show himself, and aroused the essayist's interest.

' This man's feet had been so taught to perform the services of his hands that indeed they have half forgotten their natural office.' With his feet this man discharged a pistol, threaded a needle, played cards and combed his head with great dexterity. How he would have interested Samuel Pepys. Montaigne notices that the sense of smell is soon fatigued, and wonders whether animals have more senses than we. For example how does a cock know what time to crow ? Why do chickens shrink from a cat and not from a dog ? What sense inspires sick animals to seek the proper plant or herb for their cure ? Should musk be regarded as agreeable or not, seeing that though delightful to smell, it is offensive to taste ? Why does a picture when handled seem flat to the touch when it appears raised and embossed to the sight ? He never ceased to speculate. Que s^ais-je ??what do I know ? He tells a lot more tales. There was the strange case of Mary, a girl until she was twenty-two, but who, straining at a leap, suddenly became a male. When Montaigne saw him, he was old and bearded, but had not married. And the girls of the time have to this day a song about it, ' Be careful how you jump : no wonder ! There is an essay on thumbs where one learns with surprise that the Lacedaemonian pedagogues used to chastise their scholars by biting their thumbs. Here to end this section is a comment applicable perhaps to our own times when there is so much issuing of instructions and orders and defacing of paper generally.

' Scribbling seems to be a sign of a disordered and licentious age. When did the Romans so much as when their commonwealth was upon the ' (write) point of ruin ?

Montaigne the metaphysician. Although this dear old man, as the lively Marquise called him, always looked on the best side of things and was cheerful in the midst of calamity with the true wisdom of a stoical hedonist who did nothing sans gayete, yet he was perpetually concerned with mortality, and the way to dusty death. He knew that the infinite is not to be known by man, but his scepticism was far from being a complete negative. Man's judgment he thought fallible and dogmatism a vanity. He believed in a God though utterly incomprehensible, and approved of the ritual of religions, though he objected to the torture of bodies for the sake of the souls. He enquired scientifically and doubted respectfully, smiling the while. The apostle of cheerfulness, he had an infallible nose for an atmosphere of gloom, and never shirked looking upon things as they are. Only so can one avoid unnecessary sorrow, he taught. 420 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil, as you make it. And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all ; one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light or shade ; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed and that shall also entertain your posterity.'

He asked what human reason told him about the soul. Where did it reside ? The ancient are raked for informatino. Hippocrates and Hierophilus placed it in the ventricle of the brain ; throughout the whole body ; in the stomach. He goes to but gets no ' satisfaction. He is surprised to find how the soul is jostled by the ' ' vapours of burning fever or laid asleep by some medicaments and ' ' roused by others or has its faculties overthrown by the bite of a mad dog.' It seems it is a corporeal soul he is after. He never gets to the end of his speculations which he weaves and interweaves, and concludes, ' The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.' To study philosophy is to learn to die. ' Since God gives us leisure to order our removal, let us make ready, truss our baggage, take leave betimes of the company He wishes for himself that death might find him planting his cabbages or riding his horse, indifferent to his coming, and quotes the sudden deaths related in his favourite classics, how Aeschylus was knocked on the head by a tortoise falling out of an eagle's talons in the air ; another choked by a grape-stone ; an emperor killed by the scratch of a comb in combing his head ; another by a stumble on his own threshold. Remem- bering his friend Boetie he re-assembles in mind all the paraphernalia of the sick-room. He certainly approves of the skeleton at the feast. The ' phenomenon of sleep, the death of each day's life,' naturally attracts him in this relation. ' It is not without reason that we are taught to consider sleep as a resem- blance of death ; with how great facility do we pass from waking to sleeping and within how little concern do we lose the knowledge of light and of our- selves. Peradventure the faculty of sleeping would seem useless and contrary to nature since it deprives us of all action and sentiment, were it not that by it nature instructs us that she has equally made us to die as to live ; and in life presents to us the eternal state she reserves for us after it ; to accustom us to it and take from us the fear of it. Such as have by some violent accident fallen into a swoon, have been very near seeing the natural face of death.' He believed in prayer, and was ecclesiastically orthodox. His paganism was his own. He died in the faith, ever insisting that he was himself, and in full control to the end.

' We can experiment by once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.' Any time he writes about death and what is to come he becomes eloquent and speaks finely. ' Why dost thou fear thy last (lay ? All days travel towards death, the last arriveth.' ' Death is less to be feared than nothing, if there could be anything less than nothing.' He taught that death is liberty, but used all his philosophy to sustain himself. MON'l'A IGNE?CARTER 421

As he got older liis complaint gave him more and more trouble. He spent his last few years adding to his book. The end came through a quinsy, it is said, which made him unable to speak for three days. Paralysis of the tongue is mentioned, but he may have had only a simple aphonia. He might have been in a semi-uraemic state due to the chronic kidney disease which could have supervened by now, and he would not resist infection well. One just wonders if it was diphtheria, which was epidemic in Spain from 1583-1600. Conjecture is fruitless. It was September, 1592, and he was in his sixtieth year. As the Host was elevated before him, he made a sign of recognition, and fell forward, dead. But in his essays he had left behind him all that intangible quality of his own quintessence, which in life he sought in vain to capture and define.

Montaigne modestly described his three volumes as merely a posy of other men's flowers and claimed only the thread that bound them as his own. He exaggerated his debt, for he had a great deal to say for himself and was full of good sense. The sweep of his genius made Balzac write that he had carried human reason as far and as high as it could go both in politics and morals ; and Victor Hugo maintained that Montaigne's influence had weaned Shakespeare from the Italian conceits of his earlier manner and prepared the way for the deeper philosophical thought displayed in the great tragedies. It may be, as Pater in his tessellated prose somewhere suggests, that learned of him that ' there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.'

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

There are three well-known English translations of Montaigne : Plorio's, 1G03, Cotton's, 1(585 (later edited by Hazlitt 1842, and again by W. C. Hazlitt 1889), and Treclimann's modern translation (Oxford Press). The first two have frequently been reprinted. All three have been consulted, but most of the quotations are from Cotton's version. Garrison, P. II. (1917). History of medicine, 2nd edition. Pondon Sicliel, E. (1911). Michel de Montaigne. Pondon Taylor, J. S. (1921). Montaigne and Medicine. Pondou