The Imaginary Invalid Analysis

The world would be a planet filled with illness and disease without the brilliant discovery and research of medical treatment, but it hasn’t always been so affective. Medicine and surgery has significantly improved in the past several centuries, which has caused deaths by disease to decrease and life span to increase. Unlike doctors in modern times, physician in the 1600s, like the ones in Moliere’s farce, did not have advanced technology and research in medicine. Because of this, doctors in that time frequently guessed diseases and treatments, which was not healthy. In The Imaginary Invalid, medical care was futile because doctors lacked understanding of diseases, honesty with patients, and knowledge of treatments. The first reason that doctors were useless in The Imaginary Invalid is that they lacked understanding of diseases. While Physicians knew side effects of illnesses and sometimes how to differentiate them, they did not know what caused them or why. Most doctors during Moliere’s time still believe that humans had four humors, which were body fluids in the body. These humors consisted of blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Their belief was that illness came …show more content…
While physicians in The Imaginary Invalid may have been intelligent and book smart, most often their treatments and medicine would be based from personal superstitions. When attempting to explain this to Argan, Beralde declares, “…and the whole excellence of their art consists in a pompous gibberish, in a specious verbiage, which gives you words instead of reasons, and promises instead of effects” (58; 3.3). Also, they lied quite often about how much they knew. For instance, two physicians completely contradicted each other when diagnosing Argan in Moliere’s play. One of the physicians even fooled Argan by claiming he could tell his illness and more by feeling his