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Scepticaemic Surgeon - How Not to Win Friends & Influence People (Hardcover)
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Scepticaemic Surgeon - How Not to Win Friends & Influence People (Hardcover)
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Michel de Montaigne invented the literary term "essay" derived from
the French word essai, meaning to put on trial. In his collection
of essays he describes his life's work in testing his responses to
different subjects and situations, using his ego and alter ego as
council for and against the case. In one such essay he writes, "Why
do doctors begin by practising on the credulity of their patients
with so many false promises of a cure, if not to call the powers of
the imagination to the aid of their fraudulent concoctions?" It is
hard to believe that this was written over 400 years ago, yet this
book of essays in the style invented by Montaigne, is still
addressing the same follies ascribed to 16th Century French
citizens. In 1764 Voltaire published his Dictionnaire philosophique
in which he took the essay format one step further by adding his
sardonic wit, to better illuminate the follies and fallacies of
that epoque. One of his aphorisms that resonates 250 years on, went
like this: "Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power
of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for
it to be believed". Thomas Browne, an English essayist of the same
period attempted to understand the follies of mankind and their
capacity of making "vulgar errors" in observation and belief. One
was entitled "That a man hath one Rib less than a woman". Christian
orthodoxy of the day taught a fundamentalist interpretation of the
Bible. It therefore followed that if Eve were fashioned from Adam's
rib, then Eve's descendents would always have one more rib than
Adam's descendents. Browne doubted that and went to study anatomy
in the Low Countries and made his business to count the number of
ribs on both sides of the chest in male and female cadavers.
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