Somehow, lying in bed recovering, I remembered what Montaigne said about how the ancient Babylonians dealt with their sick.
They healthy hauled the sick to market so everyone would get to inspect them and suggest a cure.
It was medicine by helpful suggestion. Or so said Montaigne.
Montaigne’s story made me smile. No one is threatening to put me in a wheelbarrow and haul me to market. I’m grateful I can just lie in bed.
In another essay that mentions his own sickness, Montaigne said:
Many things appear greater in thought than in fact … I used to pity the sick much more than I find myself deserving of pity now that I am sick myself, and that the power of my imagination made the true essence of the actual sickness bigger by half. I hope that the same thing will happen with death and that it will not be worth all the trouble I am taking to prepare for it.
Montaigne’s imagination doesn’t work quite like mine. I imagined that having COVID would be like having a tiger by the tail, and it was for me. And though I worry needlessly about many topics, turning the possibilities over in my imagination, death isn’t one of them.
• Sources: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. The note on Babylonian medicine is from “On the resemblance of children to their fathers,” p. 882. He pinched the story from Herodotus, but Montaigne’s version stuck in my mind. The extended quotation that mentions his illness is from “On practice,” p. 418.
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