Hume first published this book in 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, and gave it its present title in 1758. It is his deliberate second attempt at the material of Book I of the Treatise, written, he said, so that the argument would no longer fail through its manner.
Medical tag
Quackery Charlatans
Quacks, mountebanks, false cures, satire of medicine.
Works
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
Characters is a collection of brief sketches of recognizable social types: the dissembler, flatterer, chatterer, boor, complaisant man, reckless man, tactless man, mean man, show-off, coward, oligarchic sympathizer, late learner, slanderer and many others. Each sketch begins with a definition and then offers small scenes in which the type reveals himself through repeated behavior.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Wesley's Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick make an unusually strong pairing for a medical classics library. The sermons define Methodist teaching on salvation, new birth, sanctification, practical holiness, the means of grace, Christian perfection, money, self-denial, and social responsibility.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
Passages
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part II and notes
Reported miraculous cures at the tomb of the Abbé Pâris, with physicians and witnesses for and against, including the case of Mademoiselle Thibaut.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 22
In Paris Candide falls ill; doctors and others descend on him and his health worsens under their care.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 17
Don Quixote brews and drinks the balsam of Fierabras; he and Sancho are violently sick.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 47
As governor of Barataria, Sancho is denied his meals by the physician Pedro Recio de Agüero.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. XXXVII, 'Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers'
First-person account of kidney stone attacks, speculation on hereditary transmission from his father, and a long critique of physicians' contradictions and fees.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 5
A Lagado physician treats colic by inflating the patient with bellows.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 6
Political projectors propose physicians to diagnose senators and a surgical swap of half-brains between party leaders.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, Ch. 6
Gulliver explains European physicians, purges, clysters and the habit of foretelling death to save reputation.
- Natural History: A Selection, Books 28–32
Animal-derived remedies and charms blur medicine, magic and credulity.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXXXVII
Impostors who promise prolongation of life, retarding of old age, relief of pain and the exaltation of the intellect discredit honest natural philosophy.
- Pensees, Fragment 82, Section II
Imagination as the 'mistress of error', able to make men healthy or sick; the philosopher sweating on a plank above a precipice; cats, rats and a crushed coal that 'unhinge the reason'; physicians in cassocks and mules; diseases that spoil judgment.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 268a–c
Socrates imagines a man claiming to be a physician because he knows how to induce vomiting and purging, without knowing when or for whom.
- Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick, Primitive Physick, preface and remedy lists
Wesley promotes simple remedies and access for the poor, revealing eighteenth-century lay medicine and its hazards.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 6
Tom and Huck discuss folk cures for warts, including spunk-water and swinging a dead cat in a graveyard.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 12
Aunt Polly, infatuated with patent medicines, tries the water treatment and other remedies on a listless Tom, who gives the Pain-killer to the cat.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, A Doctor in Spite of Himself, Act 2
Sganarelle, disguised as a physician, diagnoses Lucinde's feigned dumbness with Latin nonsense and reversed anatomy.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 3
Monsieur Purgon curses Argan with a cascade of diseases; Toinette, disguised as a doctor, prescribes absurd remedies; Argan feigns death to test his family.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, final interlude
Burlesque Latin ceremony admitting Argan to the medical profession.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Horace, Satire 1.8
Canidia and Sagana's magic rites invoke poisons, corpses and bodily grotesquerie in a comic anti-witchcraft scene.
Quotes
“These gentlemen understood nothing of my illness, therefore concluded I could not be ill”
Frequently cited
“He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers”
“But where are the portraits of those who have perished in spite of their vows”
“If magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps”
“Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases”