“the Disease of the Doctor”: Molière’s Critique of Medicine & Society in Le Médecin Malgré Lui and Le Malade Imaginaire

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were filled with enormous and unprecedented change for the medical profession in France. Citizens of the country were beginning to choose between different available types of healthcare and practitioners that practiced their brand of medicine throughout the country (Brockliss and Jones 284). The qualifications of these practictioners varied greatly—as Brockliss and Jones put it, “…running from learned graduate physicians to theatrical itinerant charlatans to rustic Ladies Bountiful,” (284). Although much of the population was unable to acquire the services of a well-educated physician due to poverty, essentially narrowing down choices to only lower-class practitioners, the learned medical community still faced a challenge in separating themselves from what they viewed as inferior medical practices. Medical professionals of the era adopted a specific persona that would help reflect their superior education and class in an attempt to establish themselves as legitimate physicians. Despite this, however, there was still a significant amount of criticism in the arts and in public, accusing doctors of being well-versed in the rituals of antiquity but incapable of actually healing a patient (Porter 131). Perhaps the most skilled and vocal about his disdain for the medical profession during this period was seventeenth-century Molière—a playwright and actor who targeted doctors in many of his satirical comedies. Though many of these comedies, employed stock, buffoon archetypes to satirize the medical profession, experiences and changes throughout Molière’s career led to more complex representations of the medical community in his plays that effected theater, medicine, and society. After establishing himself in comedy—a much more difficult path for a playwright at the time than tragedy—Molière achieved success while still genuinely using his plays as a vehicle for his emotions and opinions (Fernandez 51). Molière reflected his

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