SOURCE: “Parasitology in Molière: Satire of Doctors and Praise of Paramedics,” in Literature and Medicine, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1993, pp. 1-18.

[In this essay, Jaymes explicates Molière's view of health and medicine, arguing that his satire of doctors is rooted in questions of responsibility and what constitutes appropriate authority. Molière, the critic contends,“seems to take serious issue with any attempt to sever the link between mind and body.… For him consulting a physician is tantamount to abdicating responsibility for one's health, an abdication that usually consists of turning one's body over to a mere physical specialist.”]

Molière's doctors are a strange lot. All the real ones in his plays are bad doctors; the only ones who heal, usually servants in a middle-class family, are masquerading as doctors.¹ Molière seems to have been fascinated by the paradox of a sclerotic, parasitic profession given to ineffective, violent medical practices. How is one to make sense of a therapeutic world in which the real doctors fail, the fake doctors succeed in healing, and the difference between doctor and patient is not always clear? In this study of two of Molière's comedies, Doctor Cupid and The Imaginary Invalid, I propose that the playwright's satire of the medical profession emerged as the comic exploitation of a phenomenon of interference.² In Molière's plays, medical intervention never restores health but is always reduced to interference.

The relationship between mind and body dominates Molière's views of health and sickness. Illness is almost always the result of psychosomatic problems, usually a case of the mind working against the body, of self-interference that undermines health. Analogously, any attempt by physicians to cure illness is doomed to failure and is equated with mere meddling. The medical profession itself, as depicted by Molière, is divided, ineffectual, and self-interfering.

Yet healing does occur in Molière's plays, usually at the hands of domestic servants but sometimes through the agency of a relative or a lover. Strangely, it is the nonphysicians, the paramedics, who somehow have the perspective required to soothe the raging mind and restore the family to health. Their meddling becomes an effective intervention not subject to the laws of interference that plague the real physicians. In Molière's plays one cannot stare things medical directly in the face; for him medicine is the realm of the oblique glance. There are clues in the form of symptoms, but only the paramedics succeed in interpreting them correctly or at least know when to let well enough alone. The professional is by definition excluded from the inner realm. Neither physicians nor paramedics hit the mark directly: the physicians' professionalism prevents them from doing so; the paramedics' distance from illness is precisely what allows them to succeed in restoring health. Specialization leads to blindness; detachment produces insight.

My reading of the two comedies owes much to Michel Serres, the French philosopher and historian of science. I use Serres's concept of the parasite to elucidate the doctor-patient relationship in the comedies. In fact, my interpretation extends to the medical comedies ideas that Serres elaborates in other context, including some of Molière's non-medical plays. Because of his many references to seventeenth-century French literature, Serres provides the advantage of uniting seventeenth-century drama and twentieth-century scientific theory. Throughout, Serres's voice will be that of a companion.

In French the word parasite may mean a biological parasite, a social parasite, or electrical interference. As used by the Greeks, the prefix para- meant “beside” and sitos “grain” or “food.” The word originally signified “fellow guest.” In his work The Parasite and other studies, Serres analyzes the function of this uninvited dinner guest in all kinds of systems—mechanical, biological, thermodynamic, communication, and information. Whether as noise, static, interference, redundancy, flattery, a virus, a leech, or a religious impostor, the parasite is an integral part of human institutions. If it is a microbe, it takes up residence in its host, perhaps weakening the host's defenses and causing illness. If, however, the parasite is a vaccine, a small dose of the poison, it can actually strengthen its host's resistance to disease and thereby play a constructive role. As static in an electronic circuit, it is the opposite of communication but is necessary in any attempt to define and control communication.

All systems, argues Serres, are subject to invasion by a parasite. In some cases it causes revolutionary change within the system; in others little if any change occurs. Above all, the parasite violates the system of exchange: it eats its host's food but pays only with words. It engages in unfair exchange or interrupts exchange. Its relations with others are never reciprocal; it takes but never gives. Yet the same parasite is also responsible for producing a different order in the system it inhabits. Hermes, the Greek god of commerce, invention, cunning, and theft, is the patron of Serres's parasitology because of his ambiguous role as both obstacle and means to communication.

Serres's parasitology provides a particularly appropriate means of studying the logic of the parasite in two of Molière's medical comedies. In them, both the doctors and the paramedics are parasites. The former take money but fail to heal their patients. The latter, on the contrary, return their patients to health through the counterfeit monies of cunning and trickery.

In Doctor Cupid the equilibrium of Sganarelle's household has been upset by the death of his wife. He turns his attention to his daughter, Lucinde, only to discover that she suffers from severe melancholy, caused, as is eventually revealed, by love. Perhaps she was in love before her mother's death and no one noticed. More likely, her love coincided with the passing of her mother whom, as one generation supplants another, Lucinde will have to replace.

Because Molière's comic vision always favors life over death in almost Darwinian fashion, he supports Lucinde, who is in love for the first time, as the repository of life. When Sganarelle assembles friends, relatives, and acquaintances to ask how to deal with his daughter, however, he discovers that their concern lies elsewhere; their advice reflects only the self-interest of the adviser. Among the consultants there is no third person, no one who stands outside the system in a disinterested way. All are parasites ready to feed at Sganarelle's table, although he is shrewd enough to realize it. When he rejects out of hand the suggestion that he allow Lucinde to marry because he does not want to pay for a dowry, he finds himself in a closed circle that he needs to break. Although he will be unhappy with the results, a solution is presented to him by Lucinde's maidservant, Lisette. The girl divines that her mistress is in love, that she has “a secret inclination” for someone she wishes to marry.³ Lisette is thus the first in a series of good parasites, the excluded third person who will allow things to change within the family.

Serres has written that “the parasite is an exciter.” Rather than “transforming a system,” it produces differential changes in state. Often the change is minimal, a mere inclination; at other times enormous changes occur by “chain reaction or reproduction.”⁴ In terms of information theory, the “inclination” is what sets things in motion. Actually, Sganarelle has to deal with two such exciters, his wife's “decline” and Lucinde's “inclination.”

Lisette's scheme is to tell Sganarelle that his daughter is in despair and hint at the possibility of suicide. Her plan backfires initially because Sganarelle immediately summons four doctors to the house.⁵ Dr. Tomès quickly diagnoses the patient as suffering from hot blood and prescribes bloodletting. The second doctor, Des Fonandrès, just as quickly opines that the problem is a rotting of the humors and orders an enema. They trade accusations of malpractice as each doctor claims that his colleague's remedy will kill the patient. For all their dynamism the two doctors, in arriving at conflicting diagnoses and remedies, still reach equilibrium.

If matters were to remain at this point, nothing in the household would change except that Sganarelle would be out some money. He therefore turns to the second pair of doctors to break the deadlock. The only difference they make is to suggest beginning treatment with less drastic remedies, but they recommend proceeding eventually to the same bloodletting and enema, which both support and would repeat, if necessary. Dr. Macroton, a member of the second pair, explains to the father with extremely painful slowness—there is a comic parallel between the slowness of speech and the slowness of the brain—how he plans to proceed differently from the first two doctors in treating the ill daughter:

Mon—sieur, in ca—ses like this—one must—act with cir—cum—spec—tion and not try—to catch the ball—in mid air,—on the fly as the ex—pres—sion goes,—all the more so—be—cause our great mas—ter Hip—poc—ra—tes has o—pin—ed that there are gr—eat dan—gers in—vol—ved.⁶

Thus the second round of consultations produces essentially the same result, reinforcing the equilibrium established by the first pair of doctors.

It is here that Molière reveals the medical profession in its most sclerotic form. By bringing the four doctors into the household Sganarelle has not changed anything; he has brought only violent but conflicting remedies delivered, in one case, by slowness of speech. The dynamism of the first pair of doctors is deceptive, for together the four physicians are poised stupidly in equilibrium above the patient, whose illness they do not discern. This impasse conforms to Serres's position that the parasite may have either a great effect or no effect at all on a system. Obviously, the latter is the result of the four doctors in Sganarelle's home.

The problem of these doctors is that they are too specialized; as professionals they have reached a kind of homeostasis. Their method insulates and isolates them from change. Serres explains that professional sclerosis may be the by-product of the general processes of compart-mentalization and categorization. The great and powerful surround themselves with others who share the same views in order to form a “network of minimum risk”: “The division of work, parties, ideas, science, religions … produces little local kings who have open house where those who militate with drawn-out thoughts eat but never fight.”⁷

Serres is right; Dr. Macroton and his three colleagues, these physicians who “militate with drawn-out thoughts,” do not wish to fight; they have come only to eat. It is no coincidence, then, that a fifth doctor, Filerin, arrives quickly to plead with his colleagues not to wash dirty linen in public by revealing their dissension:

Let's try at least to hold on to the public esteem that their fear of illness has given us. We need to remain together to take credit when the illness has done us a favor, and blame on nature all the mistakes we bury. We need to think twice before we stupidly throw out all the fortunate aspects—for us—of an admittedly defective science, but one that puts a lot of bread on a lot of tables.⁸

Molière satirized the medical profession only about a century after its legitimacy was recognized.⁹ In the development of the profession, the scene in Sganarelle's house symbolically reenacts the founding of a medical society-cum-pressure group. The members of this medical society, the doctors in Doctor Cupid, are ineffective in treating illness, perhaps because they are too well fed, too healthy themselves. Their own equilibrium may be what keeps them from making the oblique glance that is crucial to diagnosis. In writing about sickness, Serres explains that one tradition attributed health to the silent functioning of organs. He remarks sarcastically that health may actually come from the silence of the medical sciences, busy with pathology: “The normal does not say much, if anything at all. …”¹⁰ This is the situation created by our four doctors: their dissension prevents them from acting effectively and renders them dumb. They are too normal, fat from being too well fed. Unlike some of Molière's paramedics, they are not motivated; they already eat at the host's table and have nowhere else to go. Socially and otherwise, the doctors are at the center of things, and the center is not where change occurs. The true diagnostician must be off-center.

Lisette, who has been caught off guard by the arrival of the four doctors, is able to regain the upper hand because they have effectively blocked one another in their attempts at treatment. Lisette's new plan is to disguise Lucinde's lover as the attending physician. In what is supposedly a diagnosis, Clitandre supplants Sganarelle at the center of the stage by evoking the confidentiality between doctor and patient in order to woo Lucinde; no sooner has he spoken than Lucinde is cured. Clitandre has already made clear that he does not employ the usual bloodlettings, enemas, and so forth, but achieves his healing effects through magical and mystical means—words, sounds, letters, talismans, and magic rings. When queried about Lucinde's illness, Clitandre launches into a speech about the psychosomatic nature of illness, suggesting that Lucinde has suffered from a mental disorder:

As the mind has great influence on the body and is often the source of illness, my usual practice is to work right away on the mind and to deal with the body later. Thus, I observed her glances, her facial features, and the lines of her two hands. And through the knowledge that Heaven has given me, I saw that the illness was in her mind. The sole cause of her illness was a disordered imagination, a depraved desire to get married.¹¹

Although he claims that, personally, he has a strong aversion to marriage, Clitandre explains to the father that, as one must “flatter patients through their imagination,” he will “approach Lucinde through her weakness” and propose marriage.¹² Sganarelle agrees to the scheme, thinking that the marriage is only feigned, part of his daughter's cure. A lawyer who Sganarelle thinks is Dr. Clitandre's pharmacist is brought in to draw up the contract, including Lucinde's dowry. The two lovers go off to be married, and Sganarelle discovers that the marriage is real. In losing his daughter, he has also lost a pile of money.

Employing their parasitological strategy, Clitandre and Lisette obviously transform the Sganarelle household in a radical manner. Lucinde's desire to marry is disease only because of her father, who has denied her the man she loves. Thus Clitandre, in proposing marriage to Lucinde, choosing her very weakness or poison as the surest path to a cure, is vaccinating her and also, in a sense, Sganarelle, the host, against the new guest about to take a seat at his dinner table. By proposing marriage as a medical stratagem, the fake doctor makes himself acceptable to his future father-in-law. Ironically, the poison used to vaccinate is medically sound for both daughter and father. Sganarelle's weakness is overreliance on the medical profession, and Clitandre uses it as the basis of his vaccine. When he first heard of his daughter's malady, Sganarelle quickly called in the medical corps. Clearly he was only too willing to give up immediate control of his daughter in return for ultimate domination over her, allowing him to choose her husband. Moreover, if the doctors who arrived at his doorstep had actually treated Lucinde, she would probably have died. Thus, by proposing marriage and doing so as a doctor in the name of health, Clitandre is giving Sganarelle some of his own medicine, so to speak.

Serres, in a context in which he is discussing another of Molière's famous parasites, the religious impostor Tartuffe, compares Tartuffe's presence in and eventual expulsion from Orgon's home to a vaccination: the family, in surviving the charlatan's onslaught, will be better able to resist the next fake. Because their defense systems have proved effective, their equilibrium is now more solid than before the intrusion. Serres writes that “in vaccination, poison can be a cure, and this logic with two entry points becomes a strategy, a care, a cure.”¹³ The new equilibrium in the Sganarelle household, too, is a result of the momentous change that occurs there. Initially Lucinde is in a relationship of mutual dependency with Clitandre, one that she desires. Then Sganarelle thwarts his daughter's wish to marry because he refuses to pay her dowry. His inappropriate meddling causes her illness: he intrudes in the exchange of love between his daughter and Clitandre. In so doing he is issuing a selfish declaration of independence, a refusal to engage in exchange with his daughter and the man she loves. Sganarelle has perhaps been propelled into this action partly because of his recent widowhood. He does not want to depend on others; he seeks absolute privacy, power, and authority. If he gets his way, however, he will be robbing his daughter of her autonomy, parasitizing her with his own desires, placing her in a relationship of dependency that she does not desire.

Lucinde's illness is caused by the noise, the parasites of her father's will. Lisette tries to regain control of the situation by attempting to scare Sganarelle through the possibility of Lucinde's suicide, in effect transferring the parasite back to the father. Sganarelle in turn summons the four doctors, thereby releasing leeches to feed on his daughter's illness, which is itself a parasite. The father, whose initial aim was to remain autonomous, has not only rendered his daughter dependent but, without knowing it, has also made himself dependent on the doctors. Since the doctors have already gained seats at the master's table, all Clitandre has to do is to parasitize the parasites, which he does by masquerading as a doctor. Approaching Lucinde through her “foible,” her depraved desire to marry, he effects a cure by displacing the parasite that she hosts. The technique succeeds: Clitandre marries Lucinde and Sganarelle agrees to pay the dowry, a fair exchange.

In my analysis of Molière's logic of the parasite, I shall now turn to his last play and the crowning achievement of his comic theater, The Imaginary Invalid. Many of the elements of Molière's other comedies about doctors are found also in this last play. Argan will not allow his daughter Angélique to marry Cléante, for whom she has the necessary “small inclination.”¹⁴ Rather, because he is a hypochondriac and avails himself constantly of doctors and pharmacists, Argan has devised the scheme of marrying his daughter off to a doctor as the best way of bringing a physician into the house. Characters include the usual bevy of medical personnel, all of whom, in keeping with Molière's bias, are stupid: Purgon, the current doctor; Diafoirus, father and son, the latter being Argan's choice as son-in-law; and Fleurant, the pharmacist. Toinette, the family servant, and Béralde, Argan's brother and Angélique's uncle, share the paramedical role of disabusing Argan of his error. Argan's second wife, Béline, is in cahoots with a lawyer, Bonnefoy, and plans to strip her husband of his money. Greed, it turns out, is one of Argan's saving graces, as it is one of the means used by Toinette and Béralde to pry Argan loose from his hypochondria. And there is also plenty of playacting: Toinette dons the robes of a doctor and Argan himself is called on to assume several roles.

Just after Argan has informed Angélique whom he has in mind for her to marry, Toinette queries him on the reasons for his choice of Thomas Diafoirus, the son of a doctor, who is about to be made a doctor himself. Argan explains:

I'm looking for a son-in-law and some medical allies, so that I'll be in a good position to fend off my illness. Right in my family I'd like to install the source of all the remedies, consultations, and prescriptions I am going to need.¹⁵

Rather than occasionally inviting this doctor to dine at his table, Argan wants him to become a permanent fixture, to dedicate himself exclusively to the treatment—there is never any question of a cure—of his father-in-law's illness, which, of course, is imaginary. By linking up with a father-and-son pair of doctors, Argan is obviously not taking any chances with the problematics of medical authority.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to have an in-house doctor if one can afford it. Kings and presidents have always had their own physicians and must find such an arrangement convenient. Furthermore, Argan's neurosis, one of the symptoms of which is the overreliance on doctors and medical treatment, is real as well as imaginary.¹⁶ It has disturbed his ability to function well. The doctors, themselves symptoms of the disease, will disappear when the disease does. They and all the enemas and bloodlettings Argan suffers are secondary to his real problem, a diseased self, a self that, before the arrival of the first doctor, is already prey to parasites.

Sickness, as described by Serres, is parasitic, a “shadow,” a “noise” that jumbles the messages in the circuits of a mechanism, and “the doctor eats by translating this noise.”¹⁷ By seeking medical treatment, Argan unknowingly seeks to introduce a new parasite to feed on the first. His desire to have a doctor as a member of the family constitutes an attempt to bring his physician as close as possible to the center of the self where the primary parasite feeds. His brilliant scheme—installing the doctor in the midst of his family—involves a strategy of consolidation. Argan has a problem: an unwanted parasite is feeding nightly at his table. Why not bring in young Dr. Diafoirus to eat away at the uninvited guest? By entertaining the doctor at dinner every night he is attempting self-treatment, making an effort to reorganize, strengthen, and give coherence to the self by housing illness and doctor together. It is Argan's attempt to jump on his own shadow by merging the two parts of his divided, self-destructive self to get rid of the bothersome noise and static that are constantly distracting him from his normal business. Even if the attempted consolidation accomplishes nothing more than doctor and parasite's feeding on one another, such an arrangement would be preferable to the present one.

The major defect of Argan's plan is that he does not live in isolation. In inviting Diafoirus's son into the family, he parasitizes his daughter also. Angélique and Cléante truly love one another, but Angélique is about to have her father's choice imposed on her. Toinette reminds Argan of what should be done: “But your daughter should marry a man who is right for her. And since she isn't sick, she doesn't really need a doctor.”¹⁸ One of the inexorable laws of the logic of the parasite in Molière is that parasites may be displaced but not destroyed. By letting the doctor in the door, Argan is merely shifting the problem to his daughter. As Toinette reminds us, Angélique will get a doctor without needing one. And whether she is host to Thomas Diafoirus or to her father becomes a meaningless question.

Argan in The Imaginary Invalid picks up where Sganarelle of Doctor Cupid left off. The two daughters, Lucinde and Angélique, face analogous problems; Lucinde's father tries to get his own way through a declaration of independence, Angélique's through dependence. The two fathers err in attempting to carry their desires to extremes to achieve essentially the same ends, power and autonomy. Independence and dependence, then, amount to the same thing.

In the final act of Molière's last play, these issues are raised in a new and highly significant manner. There Argan and his brother, Béralde, engage in a long discussion of doctors and medicine. Béralde totally rejects the idea of one person's trying to heal another, claiming that the springs of our being are so hidden from us and our eyes are so veiled that any such attempt would only be futile. At the very moment that he adopts this extreme position, however, Béralde is involved with Toinette in the “healing” mission of liberating his brother from over-dependence on doctors and medicine. Argan, who is more clever than he actually appears, challenges Béralde with a profound query, implying that his position is contradictory. Argan first asks Béralde if he will not at least agree that everyone, when he gets sick, goes to see a doctor. Béralde agrees, but he counters that this is proof of human weakness rather than evidence of the effectiveness of medicine. Eventually Argan comes up with his ultimate argument, that the doctors themselves must and do use the same medical services of which Béralde is so critical. Béralde responds by making a distinction between two kinds of doctors, the naïve, ignorant, and gullible doctors who, in practicing the only kind of medicine that exists, bad medicine, are not aware of what they are doing, and the hypocritical, cynical physicians who profit from the bad medicine that they too practice. Dr. Filerin in Doctor Cupid is Molière's virtually only example of the completely cynical doctor; all doctors in The Imaginary Invalid fall into the category of the naïve.¹⁹ Béralde says little about the cynics, but he goes on at length about the naïve doctor, admitting that “he'll send you packing with all the good faith in the world and, in killing you, he will only do what he has already done to his wife and children, and what, if pressed, he would do also to himself.”²⁰

The issue that Argan has raised is the paradox that the physician is human and subject to the same maladies as his patients. He correctly understands that if medicine is a sham, the doctors are the ones most involved in this ultimate form of self-deception. The issue is actually that of self-treatment: Do doctors not treat one another when they fall ill? When a doctor receives therapy, must he not believe in its effectiveness? When one doctor is treated by another doctor, is not self-treatment involved in the sense that the ill doctor must believe in the remedy, if only as the factor that motivates him to seek medical intervention in the first place? In his response to his brother, Béralde has even alluded to the ultimate form of inside knowledge within the medical calling, the reality of death: the gullible doctor would eventually bring about his own death.

Béralde's distinction between naïve and knowing doctors divides Argan's “all doctors” into two categories, allowing him to agree with part of Argan's contention: “some” doctors use medical services. His response to Argan raises the issue of insiders and inside information within a profession: the knowing, cynical doctors are aware that what they are doing is a sham, but they continue to practice in order to make money. This distinction sheds much light on Molière's satire of the medical profession. The playwright achieves his greatest comic effects by exaggerating and sharpening Béralde's distinction: the more stupid the doctor, the funnier he is; the more cynical the doctor, the more fearful and knowing is the spectator's laughter.

In Molière's medical comedies, where the lighter rather than the darker forms of comedy predominate, that comic vision is what dictates his clear preference for the naïve rather than the knowing doctor. Marcel Gutwirth has defined this kind of comedy as the “joyous awareness of human finitude”: “Servants fool their masters, wives deceive their husbands, and children undermine the authority of their parents.”²¹ Béralde himself, in the speech in which he offers the thesis of the cynical doctor, admits that Argan's physician belongs to the other category:

Your Dr. Purgon doesn't have two wits in his head to rub together: from head to foot he is as solid a doctor as they come. He believes more in his own rules than in irrefutable mathematical demonstrations, would find it totally abhorrent to question any of them, and sees nothing in the least way obscure or questionable in medicine. Off he goes, impulsively ordering enemas and bloodlettings, holding his back straight with a rigidity born of self-confidence and administering his treatments with the brutality that only those who know they are right have, with never a pause for thought.²²

Here Béralde has put his finger on the richest lode of comic ore in Molière's doctors, the contrast between their slowness of wit and the violence of the medical means they employ.

Dr. Purgon's approach to life lies closer to the joyous awareness of our limitations that is comedy, closer to health than that of the cynical, hypocritical Dr. Filerin of Doctor Cupid, who plays the same role among Molière's medical personnel as Don Juan does in his theater in general. In his essay, “The Apparition of Hermes: Dom Juan,” Serres argues that Molière's Don Juan represents the “first hero of modernity … as a scientific observer of society.” Because he totally rejects exchange (“the obligingness and obligation of gift and exchange”), takes and never gives, Don Juan becomes a total outsider to society, the parasite of parasites, the excluded third.²³ He is the first modern Hermes. Filerin, insofar as his hypocrisy and cynicism make him an outsider to his profession (the ultimate insider who defines the profession? the exception that proves the rule?), is the Hermes and Don Juan of doctors, although his evil genius is qualified comically by his interest in money and food.²⁴

I come finally to the conclusion of the drama and Argan's own return to health. As a hypochondriac Argan has acquired an insider's knowledge of illness and medicine, and this knowledge is largely his problem. Applying the concepts of noise and silence in the context of Serres's parasitology leads me to this conclusion: Argan's organs, instead of functioning in the silence of health, have started to cry out to him. In very simple terms, he has become altogether too aware of his entrails in particular and of his health in general. Self-awareness is thus the problem; Argan has brought into awareness bodily functions that normally operate silently. With his mind Argan has begun to interfere with his body; his mind has parasitized his body. And the noise will not go away. In putting together their grand scheme to restore Argan to health, Béralde and Toinette must realize that in some respects Argan is a hopeless case, that it would be extremely difficult to restore the old naïveté that allowed him to function healthily. They must know that the road from innocence to knowledge is a one-way street, that once the membrane of naïveté is torn it cannot be mended. For this reason, I think, the two of them land on the solution of turning Argan into a doctor. They decide that this is the only realistic way of treating Argan's illness, the only remedy totally consonant with the malady.

Immediately after the speech in which Béralde presents his thesis of the naïve and the cynical doctors, Argan asks what one should do when one is sick, and Béralde replies:

Nothing. Stop and do absolutely nothing. Nature, all by herself, when we leave her alone, will pull herself quietly out of any troubles she has gotten into. It's when we worry, our impatience spoils everything. Just about everyone dies from the remedies, not their maladies.²⁵

In the next scene, when the pharmacist, Fleurant, arrives to administer a “small enema,” Béralde offers the same advice to Argan: “You've got to be kidding. Can't you get along for a minute without enemas and medicine? Why don't you put the enema off, and get some rest from all that.”²⁶ The rest that Béralde prescribes is sensible; he reasons that Argan will be much better off if he stops worrying so much about such matters, gives his body a rest, and lets it take care of itself. The statement that nature takes care of itself is an admonition to leave well enough alone, to let the body function silently in its unconsciousness so that it may return to health.

The brother's strategy is successful. Fleurant gets angry at Argan's refusal to take the enema. Purgon appears on the scene and, after tearing up the donation to his nephew and Angélique's wedding, angrily threatens Argan with death. All of this tumult, plus Argan's belief that he has died, is enough to drive a wedge between him and his folly. But Argan is not really dead, and Béralde and Toinette persuade him to do a little playacting and to pretend to be dead so he can see that his wife, Béline, is only after his money—another parasite that shadows Argan and that Béralde and Toinette use strategically to separate him from his folly. Having been threatened with death, having lived to tell the tale, and having been persuaded to imitate death before his wife, Argan is thus inoculated against his worst fear. He has finally conquered death, the parasite that has stalked his every move.

Once Argan sees that his daughter truly loves him, for she was sincerely aggrieved at the prospect of his demise, he finally agrees to let Angélique and Cléante marry on condition that Cléante become a doctor. With his condition Argan is maneuvering to displace the parasite from Purgon and company to his daughter and son-in-law. However, in a stroke of genius, Béralde suggests that Argan go the whole way and become a doctor himself: “Just think of the convenience, you'll have everything you need in yourself.”²⁷ A supreme economy. Becoming a doctor will save Argan both effort and money, the latter no minor consideration for him. By symbolically allowing Dr. Purgon to eat unimpeded at the host's table, Béralde may also be imparting the doctor's good health to Argan: despite his shortcomings as a medical practitioner, Purgon's naïveté and the accompanying silence of his organs may be just what Argan needs.

The play ends as Argan and family prepare for the mock robing ceremony during which Argan will be elevated to the status of doctor in a festival of dance and music. In response to Angélique's suggestion that he may be playing just a trifle with her father, Béralde admits to his strategy of “accommodating ourselves to his folly.”²⁸ Béralde thus acknowledges that it is impossible to remove surgically the parasite of hypochondria from Argan's mind and body and that, in a “logic with two entry points,” the poison through vaccination may at times be turned into a cure, as Serres and others have realized.²⁹ He then invites all to partake of the diversion: “Each of us can play one of the roles, and thus administer a good dose of comedy to one another. All that is authorized by Carnival.”³⁰

In his comedies Molière returned so often to medical themes because illness and medical treatment intimately involve the problematics of the self. His comic thesis is that in human beings there is an inevitable interference between body and mind, and that the realization of such “static” may be the cause of laughter. In his comedies on medical themes the playwright mines the comic potential inherent in attempts by the medical profession to interfere further with the psychosomatic bond.³¹ In the context of comedy such efforts, as they modify the mind-body equation, cannot not be funny. In Doctor Cupid Lisette and others successfully use Lucinde's illness (mind-body problem) to manipulate (trick the mind of) the father into consenting to marriage (union of minds and bodies), although Sganarelle does not want to pay the dowry (exchange of money required by the marital exchange). As is often the case in Molière's theater, it is the servant who is quick-witted (mind). Sganarelle, no dummy himself (quick mind), calls in an army of doctors (mind-body specialists) in an effort to gain control of the situation. Unfortunately for Sganarelle, the doctors themselves turn out to be nothing more than a medical corporation (body but no mind). Dr. Filerin, the only quick-witted (all mind) physician in the group, is there only to make sure that his colleagues stay in rank (body). Eventually Lisette and Clitandre use their wits (mind) to regain the upper hand by having Clitandre masquerade as a doctor (fake mind-body specialist) to effect marriage (union of minds and bodies) with Lucinde and have father pay the dowry.

In The Imaginary Invalid Argan suffers from hypochondria (serious mind-body interference) and seeks to regain health by forcing his daughter to marry (imposition of a mind-body problem on a mind-body relationship) a doctor (mind-body specialist) who is stupid (body but no mind). Argan's wife and a clever lawyer connive (minds, and perhaps bodies, involved) to fleece Argan of his money. A quick-witted servant and a wise brother (two good minds) orchestrate a clever solution (harmonious mind-body relationship) to the problem. First, they manipulate Argan's doctor (mind-body specialist) into threatening the patient with death (loss of mind and body). Second, they persuade Argan (mind-body interference) to feign death (inactive body, active mind) to learn of Béline's hypocrisy (mind in control of body in order to deceive). Argan finally consents to Lucinde and Cléante's marriage if Cléante agrees to become a doctor (imposition of a mind-body problem on a mind-body relationship, with a mind-body specialist thrown in for good measure). Brother Béralde saves the day by persuading Argan to become his own mind-body specialist (self-parasitism).

The context in which all this occurs is the free play of comedy. Near the end of The Imaginary Invalid, at the same time that Béralde is trying to return Argan's entrails to their quiet unconsciousness, he brings the comedy itself into the light of consciousness. In response to Argan's bitter complaint that he is treating the medical profession unfairly, Béralde proposes going to see one of Molière's comedies as a distraction. Argan then lashes out against the famous playwright because he makes fun of honorable people like doctors. Béralde defends Molière by replying that he does not “poke fun at doctors, but at the ridiculousness of medicine.”³² Béralde is right: Molière was mainly interested in the wake of laughter that often trailed behind the mind-body specialists.

Molière's satires of doctors emphasize the negative characteristics of authority in the family, especially that of the father. In Molière's theater, as we have seen, the father is typically a tyrant, and doctors are brought in as outside specialists to shore up his waning authority. Medical authority thus emanates from paternal authority.³³ Molière's doctors appear as degraded magicians whose bumbling errors stand in marked contrast to the magical and mystical workings of a system that far transcends the family in power and mystery, the system of nature. Like his fathers, Molière's doctors are the adversaries of the natural, of love and feelings. More specifically, Molière satirizes the shortcomings of the medical profession as such. His attitude is that the great questions of health, life, and death, in particular the psychosomatic nature of humans, will not suffer the categorization and compartmentalization inherent in medical specialization.³⁴ The medical profession, once constituted, becomes an entity unto itself, a corporation having cares and concerns that are at times inimical to the patients it serves.

In engaging in such a satire, Molière follows some of the central tenets of the ancient literary tradition of Menippean satire that, according to Northrop Frye, pokes fun at “incompetent professional men … in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior.”³⁵ Molière mocks the narrow specialist who differs dramatically from the seventeenth-century French aristocratic ideal of the honnête homme, the universal man who transcends the constraints intrinsic to medical techniques and specialization.³⁶ Unlike his famous contemporary, Descartes, Molière seems to take serious issue with any attempt to sever the link between mind and body; his medical philosophy is holistic. For him consulting a physician is tantamount to abdicating responsibility for one's health, an abdication that usually consists of turning one's body over to a mere physical specialist. Argan's raging mind and Lucinde's disordered imagination are the typical results of such a surrender. The doctor has used up all the tricks in his bag; there is no sense in going to see him. One's only recourse is to turn to paramedics, to persons who are part of the household but outsiders socially, such as servants, or to other outsiders, such as an uncle or a lover. Only they have the breadth of vision and the sideways glance needed to heal, to return the patient to the give-and-take of life and health.

In conclusion and in fairness to the medical profession of seventeenth-century France that was so devastated by Molière, it behooves me to point out that satire as a literary category contains exigencies of its own analogous to those of medical specialization.³⁷ That is, the simplification, exaggeration, and caricature that are part of satire are every bit as reductive of the medical profession as Molière's doctors are of life and health. We may be sure, however, that this gentle criticism would not have fazed Molière, for his comic equation required the contrast between the wily servant and the stupid doctor, the hyperconscious patient and the unconscious physician, a flighty mind and a weighty body. This contrast was what he needed for a few good laughs.

Notes

1. In his essay “Satire of Medicine: Fact and Fantasy,” in Comedy in Context: Essays on Molière (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 108, H. Gaston Hall claims that one finds a favorable comment on medicine in Molière's theater in act 1, scene 4, of Tartuffe. There Orgon is informed by his servant, Dorine, that his wife's indisposition has been relieved by bleeding. Dorine comments that the treatment has been successful. However, the context—one in which Dorine's description of the wife's ills is constantly interrupted by Orgon's inappropriate inquiries about Tartuffe's getting enough to eat and in which Tartuffe's eating contrasts ironically with the wife's blood loss—is comic and robs the remark of any positive meaning.

2. The satire is contained mainly in the plays in which doctors—fake or real—appear as characters: The Flying Doctor (Le Médecin volant), Don Juan (Dom Juan), Doctor Cupid (L'Amour médecin), The Physician in Spite of Himself (Le Médecin malgré lui), The Citizen Turn'd Gentleman (Monsieur de Pourceaugnac), and The Imaginary Invalid (Le Malade imaginaire). Other plays contain medical themes or references to medicine.

3. “quelque secrète inclination. …” Molière, L'Amour médecin, act 1, scene 3, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Robert Jouanny, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962), 1:786. All translations of Molière are my own.

4. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 191.

5. Robert Jouanny has pointed out that the five doctors who visit the household are caricatures of actual physicians, including Louis XIV's own doctor and other doctors who treated members of the court. See Jouanny's “Notice” to L'Amour médecin, in Oeuvres complètes, 1:778-79.

6. “Mon-si-eur. dans. ces. ma-ti-è-res-là. il. faut. pro-cé-der. a-vec-que. cir-con-spec-tion. et. ne. ri-en. fai-re. com-me. on. dit. à. la. vo-lé-e. d'au-tant. que. les. fau-tes. qu'on. y. peut. fai-re. sont. se-lon. no-tre. maî-tre. Hip-po-cra-te. d'u-ne. dan-ge-reu-se. con-sé-quen-ce.” Molière, L'Amour médecin, act 2, scene 5, in Oeuvres complètes, 1:797.

7. Serres, The Parasite, 195.

8. “Conservons-nous donc dans le degré d'estime où leur foiblesse nous a mis, et soyons de concert auprès des malades pour nous attribuer les heureux succès de la maladie, et rejeter sur la nature toutes les bévues de notre art. N'allons point, dis-je, détruire sottement les heureuses préventions d'une erreur qui donne du pain à tant de personnes.” Molière, L'Amour médecin, act 3, scene 2, in Oeuvres complètes, 1:801.

9. D. Heyward Brock, “The Doctor as Dramatic Hero,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 34 (Winter 1991): 279.

10. Serres, The Parasite, 197.

11. “Comme l'esprit a grand empire sur le corps, et que c'est de lui bien souvent que procèdent les maladies, ma coutume est de courir à guérir les esprits, avant que de venir au corps. J'ai donc observé ses regards, les traits de son visage, et les lignes de ses deux mains; et par la science que le Ciel m'a donnée, j'ai reconnu que c'étoit de l'esprit qu'elle étoit malade, et que tout son mal ne venoit que d'une imagination déréglée, d'un desir dépravé de vouloir être mariée.” Molière, L'Amour médecin, act 3, scene 6, in Oeuvres complètes, 1:805.

12. “flatter l'imagination des malades, … je l'ai prise par son foible. …” Molière, L'Amour médecin, act 3, scene 6, in Oeuvres complètes, 1:805.

13. Serres, The Parasite, 193.

14. “quelque petite inclination. …” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 3, scene 11, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:839.

15. “je veux me faire un gendre et des alliés médecins, afin de m'appuyer de bon secours contre ma maladie, d'avoir dans ma famille les sources des remèdes qui me sont nécessaires, et d'être à même des consultations et des ordonnances.” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 1, scene 5, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:774.

16. See the study by Ralph Albanese, Jr., of the nature of Argan's illness in “Le Malade imaginaire, ou le jeu de la mort et du hasard,” Dix-Septième Siècle 39 (January-March 1987), 3-15.

17. Serres, The Parasite, 197.

18. “Mais votre fille doit épouser un mari pour elle; et, n'étant point malade, il n'est pas nécessaire de lui donner un médecin.” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 1, scene 5, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:775.

19. I do not share the view of Ralph Albanese, Jr., that Monsieur Diafoirus, in act 2, scene 5, manifests hypocrisy and cynicism similar to those of Molière's Don Juan. See Albanese, Jr., 14, n.23.

20. “c'est de la meilleure foi du monde qu'il vous expédiera, et il ne fera, en vous tuant, que ce qu'il a fait à sa femme et ses enfants, et ce qu'en un besoin il feroit à lui-même.” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 3, scene 3, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:824-25.

21. Marcel Gutwirth, Molière ou l'invention comique: la métamorphose des thèmes et la création des types (Paris: Minard, 1966), 10, 9. My translation.

22. “Votre Monsieur Purgon, par exemple, n'y sait point de finesse: c'est un homme tout médecin, depuis la tête jusqu'aux pieds; un homme qui croit à ses règles plus qu'à toutes les démonstrations des mathématiques, et qui croiroit du crime à les vouloir examiner; qui ne voit rien d'obscur dans la médecine, rien de douteux, rien de difficile, et qui, avec une impétuosité de prévention, une roideur de confiance, une brutalité de sens commun et de raison, donne au travers des purgations et des saignées, et ne balance aucune chose.” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 3, scene 3, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:824.

23. Michel Serres, “The Apparition of Hermes: Dom Juan,” in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 3, 5.

24. In his essay “Impie en médecine: Molière et les médecins,” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 14 (1987), 796-97, John Cairncross has pointed to impiety as the parallel between Filerin and Don Juan. I see the impious, cynical doctor as having peripheral rather than central importance in Molière's satire of doctors.

25. “Rien. Il ne faut que demeurer en repos. La nature, d'elle-même, quand nous la laissons faire, se tire doucement du désordre où elle est tombée. C'est notre inquiétude, c'est notre impatience qui gâte tout, et presque tous les hommes meurent de leurs remèdes, et non pas de leurs maladies.” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 3, scene 3, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:825.

26. “Vous vous moquez. Est-ce que vous ne sauriez être un moment sans lavement ou sans médecine? Remettez cela à une autre fois, et demeurez un peu en repos.” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 3, scene 4, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:827.

27. “La commodité sera encore plus grande, d'avoir en vous tout ce qu'il vous faut.” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 3, scene 14, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:844.

28. “s'accommoder à ses fantaisies.” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 3, scene 14, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:846.

29. Serres, The Parasite, 193.

30. “Nous y pouvons aussi prendre chacun un personnage, et nous donner ainsi la comédie les uns aux autres. Le carnaval autorise cela.” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 3, scene 14, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:846.

31. In 1667 Molière became the patient of Mauvillain, a physician interested in psychosomatic afflictions. See Hall, 111.

32. “Ce ne sont point les médecins qu'il joue, mais le ridicule de la médecine.” Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, act 3, scene 3, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:826.

33. D. Heyward Brock remarks that in the Italian commedia dell'arte, to which Molière owed so much, the doctor often “appeared in a domestic rather than a professional role … as a father scheming for a good match for a son, a daughter, or a servant” (p. 280). This may explain why Sganarelle plays the roles of both father and doctor.

34. See Kenneth Burke's comments on the “bureaucratization of the imaginative,” in Attitudes toward History, 3d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 225-29.

35. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 309.

36. For a recent study of the honnête homme, see Domna C. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Molière appears to share some but not all of the characteristics of the social type. The attitudes toward professional activity (pp. 94-96, 99) and leisure and rest (pp. 98-100) are especially pertinent.

37. Molière himself hosted a literary parasite during the time he was writing and performing his medical comedies. In 1670 Le Boulanger de Chalussay published L'Élomire hypocondre, a satire that borrowed bits and pieces of several of the comedies and lampooned Molière for an alleged neurosis. See Cairncross, 783-86.