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Montaigne on Medicine: Insights of a 16th-Century Skeptic

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) viewed the medicine of his time with a well-merited skepticism and had remarkable insight into its best resource, the placebo effect. Because less separates biomedicine from its Early Modern counterpart than commonly supposed, Montaigne still has much to tell us about the workings of this potent variable. When people improve as a result of surgery that did not take place, or for that matter sicken as a result of fumes that elude detection, they behave much like their counterparts in Montaigne’s world. But doctors as well as patients are subject to errors of perception and inference. It was the goal of correcting misleading impressions by more reliable knowledge that led mid-20th-century investigators of the placebo effect to propose the sort of methodologically demanding trials through which drugs are now run before being brought to market. Montaigne’s awareness of the weak foundations of claimed knowledge, prominently including medical knowledge, was central to his philosophy of the human.