Читать книгу Medicine in the Middle Ages. Extracts from "Le Moyen Age Medical" by Dr. Edmond Dupouy; translated by T. C. Minor онлайн

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“I have noted, on the occasion of my voyages, all the famous baths of Christendom, and for some years past have made use of waters, for as a general rule I consider bathing healthy and deem it no risk to one’s physical condition. The custom of ablution, so generally observed at times past in all nations, is now only practiced in a few as a daily habit. I cannot imagine why civilized people ever allow their bodies to become encrusted with dirt and their pores filled with filth.”[9]

If Montaigne made great use of mineral waters, he had in revenge a formidable dread of physicians and their medicines, a sentiment he inherited from his father, “who died,” says he, “at the age of seventy-four years,” and his “grandfather and great-grandfather died at eighty years without tasting a drop of physic.”

Montaigne has justly criticized medicine in several essays on the healing art. He knew well the intividia medicorum, and it was for this reason that he remarked that a physician should always treat a case without a consultant. “There never was a doctor,” says Montaigne, “who, on accepting the services of a consultant, did not discontinue or readjust something.” Is not the same criticism deserved at the present day? How absurd are our medical consultations. The examples Montaigne gives of disagreements of doctors in consultation as to doctrines are equally applicable to modern times. The differences of Herophilus, Erasistratus, and the Æsclepiadæ as to the original causation of disease were no greater than those of the schools of Broussais and Pasteur, which have both acquired a universal celebrity in less than half a century.