"I learned very early that our health is always impaired by some excess either of food or abstinence, and I never had any physician except myself"
About this Quote
Casanova dresses self-discipline in a libertine’s costume: the real vice, he claims, is not pleasure but imbalance. The line is a small manifesto disguised as health advice, and it works because it refuses the moral binary his era loved to impose. Excess isn’t just overeating and drunkenness; “abstinence” gets indicted too. That’s classic Casanova, a man who made a career out of slipping past polite categories. He suggests deprivation can be as damaging as indulgence, which quietly reframes restraint as another kind of appetite - and another way society polices the body.
The deeper flex is in the second half: “I never had any physician except myself.” On its surface it’s swagger, the celebrity’s cultivated myth of self-sufficiency. In context, it’s also a pointed jab at 18th-century medicine, still tangled in bleeding, purging, and theory-heavy guesswork. Casanova is implying he’s outgrown the quacks by learning his own rhythms, turning the body into something like a private estate: managed, observed, governed.
Subtextually, this is about autonomy. Health becomes a metaphor for a life lived without trustees - not doctors, not priests, not moralists. Even his hedonism gets rebranded as a kind of expertise: he knows where the line is because he’s crossed it, repeatedly, and survived to narrate it. The wit lands because it’s self-justifying, but not self-denying: a libertine arguing, with a straight face, that he’s simply practicing good hygiene.
The deeper flex is in the second half: “I never had any physician except myself.” On its surface it’s swagger, the celebrity’s cultivated myth of self-sufficiency. In context, it’s also a pointed jab at 18th-century medicine, still tangled in bleeding, purging, and theory-heavy guesswork. Casanova is implying he’s outgrown the quacks by learning his own rhythms, turning the body into something like a private estate: managed, observed, governed.
Subtextually, this is about autonomy. Health becomes a metaphor for a life lived without trustees - not doctors, not priests, not moralists. Even his hedonism gets rebranded as a kind of expertise: he knows where the line is because he’s crossed it, repeatedly, and survived to narrate it. The wit lands because it’s self-justifying, but not self-denying: a libertine arguing, with a straight face, that he’s simply practicing good hygiene.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
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