"I am essentially an amateur medecin, and this to me is almost a mania"
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A lawyer confessing to being an "amateur medecin" with "almost a mania" is Brillat-Savarin in miniature: the Enlightenment gourmand as self-appointed scientist of the body, equal parts charming and faintly suspect. The word "essentially" is the tell. It does the rhetorical work of a legal brief, smuggling a private obsession into the realm of identity. He is not merely curious about health; he is constitutionally compelled to diagnose, to tinker, to observe himself and others as edible evidence.
The line also betrays the era's porous boundaries between professions. Late 18th-century France teemed with confident amateurs: salons, pamphlets, and private experiments made "expertise" feel like something you could acquire through attention and taste rather than credentials. Brillat-Savarin's later fame in The Physiology of Taste depends on exactly this stance. He writes about eating as if it were anatomy, about pleasure as if it were data. Calling it a "mania" is a strategic self-deprecation that disarms the reader: if he admits the obsession, he can indulge it without sounding like a crank.
There's subtext, too, about control. Food, digestion, regimen: these are intimate zones where modernity begins to police the self. A lawyer turning medical amateur hints at a culture anxious about bodies and eager to rationalize appetite. The misspelled "medecin" (in English transcription) even underscores the point: he isn't claiming the title cleanly. He's claiming the impulse.
The line also betrays the era's porous boundaries between professions. Late 18th-century France teemed with confident amateurs: salons, pamphlets, and private experiments made "expertise" feel like something you could acquire through attention and taste rather than credentials. Brillat-Savarin's later fame in The Physiology of Taste depends on exactly this stance. He writes about eating as if it were anatomy, about pleasure as if it were data. Calling it a "mania" is a strategic self-deprecation that disarms the reader: if he admits the obsession, he can indulge it without sounding like a crank.
There's subtext, too, about control. Food, digestion, regimen: these are intimate zones where modernity begins to police the self. A lawyer turning medical amateur hints at a culture anxious about bodies and eager to rationalize appetite. The misspelled "medecin" (in English transcription) even underscores the point: he isn't claiming the title cleanly. He's claiming the impulse.
Quote Details
| Topic | Doctor |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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