After smoking my cigarella while thinking about these things, I could suddenly sense a weight being lifted from my shoulders. What a fool you are, I said to myself, to turn down the ducats they’re giving you just to blather nonsense loudly on the squares. Well now, I suddenly clearly realized that this was easy money! Much easier, for example, than what I earned with Dr. Monardes. God had been so good as to give me the gift of gab and I could make use of it! What is this mania for truth? I thought to myself, suddenly alarmed. The mania for truth is like every other mania from a medical point of view — it is an illness, a foolish illness. I personally have always been sufficiently levelheaded so as not to give myself over to it.
From that moment on, I did not feel any indecision whatsoever. I continued on with the campaign and stayed with it until the end. That person inside me kept laughing at me, but I laughed right back at him. In the end I had the feeling that we were starting to get along, that we were patting each other on the back. Just like that, as we laughed.
I now no longer have any doubts that I acted rightly. I saved the ducats. I soon forgot my so-called torments, yet the ducats remained. I acted rightly, as a man of medicine, a man of science. I am completely sure that Dr. Monardes, if I were ever to take the liberty of bothering him with my foolish indecisions, would definitely approve of my actions. This is somehow so clear to me that I didn’t even consider it necessary to ask him. I also think — if we must delve a little deeper into things — that this hesitation, this “voice of conscience,” as it’s called, is also something that comes from Nature. It is some manifestation of inertia, of spiritual indolence, of a lack of desire to use one’s will in order to force oneself to speak and act in a certain way. It is precisely this necessity to exercise one’s will that Nature seeks to avoid. Nature is spontaneous and lazy, not organized and strong-willed. But tobacco overcomes that. With the help of tobacco, we break Nature. We push her in the direction she ought to go. Just as during a medical procedure, dear reader. You may say: “Leave Nature alone!” Yes, but afterwards you will come to us for treatment.
17. Against Headaches
The Countess Béjar had suffered from headaches for twenty whole years. As she told us herself, she had gotten used to and resigned herself to them; what’s more, she had tried in vain to cure them with several doctors, including the royal physician Dr. Bernard, but lately, after she had entered her fortieth year, when women, on the whole, go mad — this is me talking now — as a result of Nature’s bad influence, her headaches became worse than before, almost unbearable — she woke up with one every morning, and it had poisoned all the joy in her life. Migraines — as we physicians call this ailment — can indeed be a great torment. In a certain sense, if a person has a migraine, he doesn’t have anything else — he has no husband (or wife), no children, no profession, no post, no money, no satisfaction, no joy, no life. He is, one could say, completely busy with his head.
Countess Béjar finally turned to Dr. Monardes for help.
“Why did you not call me earlier, señora?” Dr. Monardes asked after we had arrived at her estate and listened to her complaints, for which, by the way, it became clear, she had not sought medical help for several years.
“Oh, señor, I had resigned myself to them and given up,” she replied. “I had gotten used to my headaches. They would come back once every few days, usually in the evening. Only recently have they begun to appear every morning.”
The countess looked terrible. Her figure was relatively well-preserved — as far as that could be discerned beneath her wide dresses and tightened corsets — a woman of around forty-five years of age, of average height, with black hair and very well-kept, delicate, soft white hands with long fingers. But her face was a waxy white, her eyes had a dulled expression, they seemed to me to be constantly narrowed, just like her pursed lips; perhaps the headache was the reason that long fans of wrinkles stretched from the corners of her eyes and mouth. No, she didn’t look good.
“I heard,” she said, “that you cure many sicknesses with the help of new medicines brought from the Indies. Miraculous things are said about you, señor. That’s why I decided to seek your help.”
“You’ve done the right thing, señora,” the doctor assured her. “The new things brought from the Indies are above all tobacco and bezoars. You can read about them here,” the doctor said and took a copy of his book Historia medicinal (the complete edition) out of his bag.
“Thank you, señor,” replied the countess. “Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to read anything lately because of the headaches.”
“We’ll fix that, dearest señora, or at least we’ll do everything in our power,” the doctor assured her, and we set to work.
The doctor took out a leaf of tobacco and began to warm it on a brazier which the servants had brought in.
“Ugh, it smells awful!” the countess wrinkled her nose. There is something in human females which instinctively predisposes them against tobacco. It is as if Nature, which speaks more strongly within them, senses the danger and reacts hostilely.
“It may smell bad, but it works miracles,” replied the doctor. “Now please don’t move, señora.”
He placed the hot leaf on her head, and I bound it in place with a white strip of cloth tied under her chin.
“You can’t possibly expect me to wear this?” the countess asked.
“I’m afraid so,” the doctor answered.
She looked at herself in the mirror, gave a nervous laugh, and exclaimed, “Oh no, it’s absurd!”
Whereupon she called in the maid and ordered her to bring a blue ribbon for a bow, one that matched her dress, with which I then bound the leaf again, removing our white bandage. The maid also brought incense sticks, which she lit at the ends of the countess’ large room to dispel the unpleasant — in her opinion — smell of tobacco.
“Señores, I would love to show you around the palace, but how could I do so looking so absurd?!” the countess exclaimed.
The doctor assured her that this wasn’t necessary and recommended that she lie down and rest without moving. We would come back in two hours to change the leaf.
And so we did. That day, and the following two as well. The first day we changed the leaf every two hours. The second day we changed it three times, and on the third day twice — in the morning and the evening, before the countess went to sleep. In the meantime, something happened which bears noting: Once, as we were arriving to change the leaves, we met a maid at the garden gate, who was carrying in her hand nothing but the Historia medicinal itself, Dr. Monardes’ book. I was so surprised that I surely would have let the girl walk right past us before managing to ask her what was going on, but the doctor reacted more quickly than me.