Article: Montaigne & Medical Humanism

One of the greatest benefits of my study of the medical humanities has been the opportunity to take a sustained look at the life and work of Montaigne. Without question, Montaigne is the patron saint of this blog. Both his writings and the man himself are paragons of (medical) humanism, and he remains an inspiration for me both professionally and personally. In the best spirit of the humanists, I have and continue to be deeply and personally affected by Montaigne's work, and I have the strong feeling that he will remain my own Virgil in my practices and my lived experiences, both as a medical humanist and as a human being. (And much of his work will also play a prominent role in my dissertation on pain as well).

I was therefore delighted to learn that the Annals of Internal Medicine recently published an article entitled Lessons in Medical Humanism: The Case of Montaigne, by Alan G. Wasserstein (Univ. Pennsylvania Medical School). Here is the Abstract:

Michel de Montaigne, the great French humanist and inventor of the personal essay, suffered from frequent and severe renal colic. He wrote about his illness in his travel journal and in his last and greatest essay, "Of Experience." In his illness narratives, Montaigne integrated disease and suffering into his life and art. He humanized rather than conquered his disease. A mature humanism replaced his youthful Stoic philosophy of detachment and disengagement and provides a worthy model for our own medical humanism.

Though I have some minor quibbles with the article, as a whole it seemed an outstanding contribution. These sentences, near the end of the article, are what I found most striking:

I suspect that Montaigne might regard scientific medicine, for all its power, as not so different from the medicine of his own day: A high calling or specialized knowledge in whose name we "despise our existence," that is, disengage from lived human experience . . . [Physicians] could use suffering to test ourselves in our contemporary school of virtue, to stretch our capacity for empathy. We could enhance the pleasure of successful treatment by feelings, as deeply as possible, the patient's pain and then relief.

Hear hear! This is a marvelous, important article for anyone who is unsure of what relevance the medical humanities has for contemporary medical practice. Montaigne and his work remain, I believe, highly undervalued and understudied as a key to exploring deep features of illness and medical practice, and this article is an important contribution to correcting the oversight. Highly recommended.