Why are doctors so funny?

There is something wonderfully strange about going to the doctor. 

We arrive carrying questions from our minds that only our bodies seem to know the answers to. We explain the places that ache and attempt to describe the sometimes indescribable. We try to convince a complete stranger that the sharp pain we felt last Thursday—well, maybe it actually started a month ago—is real. We point, we gesture, we sigh. Then, almost magically, this stranger – who is often wearing a white coat, translates our tangled collection of sensations into a language we’ve never heard before but somehow accept as the absolute truth. 

You have a contusion of the knee.  

Are we dying?  

We are most definitely dying.  

No.  

A contusion is just another word for a bruise.

We hear the diagnosis, trust the language, and hopefully leave feeling a bit better than when we arrived.  

This patient-doctor relationship requires an extraordinary act of trust.  

No one trusts doctors more completely than Argan, the aging patriarch at the center of The Imaginary Invalid. We first meet him not worrying about his symptoms but carefully adding up the costs and the quantity of all his previous treatments. 

“This month I had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight medicinals, five bleedings and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nice, ten, eleven, twelve enemas. Wait, wait… (looking back through his pages) Last month I had fifteen medicinals and seven bleedings and twenty enemas. (Weaking visibly) Well, no wonder I don’t feel as well this month as I did last.”  

Argan’s logic is delightfully absurd: fewer treatments must mean worse health. For him, medicine has become less about healing than about reassurance, ritual, and the comforting belief that there is someone else out there that has all the answers. His faith in medicine is complete. Molière invites us to laugh at Argan, but he is also quietly asking us to consider why we place such enormous trust in those who claim to have the answers about our own bodies. 

Molière’s own connection to medicine.

Perhaps this total faith is why doctors have always made such irresistible comic characters. No playwright understood this better than Molière. Long before television introduced us to the eccentric physicians of Scrubs, Molière was sending doctors marching across the stage in flowing black robes, speaking elaborate (sometimes fake) Latin, prescribing alarming numbers of enemas and bloodlettings, and displaying an unwavering confidence that was far more convincing than their cures. 

Physicians seemed to have fascinated Molière. They appear in six of his comedies, from his early farces to The Imaginary Invalid, his final play. There was a clear reason for his fascination with doctors and medicine. Born in 1622, Molière lived during one of the most significant moments in medical history. Ancient Galenic medicine still dominated the universities of Paris. Physicians believed illness resulted from an imbalance of the body’s four humors, and treatments often included bloodletting, purging, and enemas. At the same time, discoveries such as William Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood were beginning to challenge centuries of accepted wisdom. Molière found himself standing between those two worlds. Even more personally, throughout much of his adult life, Molière suffered from a chronic respiratory illness, believed to have been tuberculosis. Persistent coughing fits, periods of exhaustion, and declining health became a constant part of his life and as such made its way into his art. 

In The Doctor in Spite of Himself, a woodcutter convinces everyone he is a celebrated physician simply by dressing and speaking the part. In The Bourgeois Gentleman, expertise itself becomes a kind of social performance. His most famous work, Tartuffe, contains no physician but still explores the dangers of surrendering judgement to someone who claims unquestionable authority. When looking at his complete body of work, one can gather his real interest was never in medicine alone but in the people and institutions we choose to put our faith into. Again and again, he returned to the same question:  

Why do we trust the people we trust? 

In the essay, “From Molière to SARS-CoV-2: How Medicine has changed” it is pointed out that while “mistrustful of the arrogant and narrow-minded court physicians” he “was neither hostile nor distrustful of medicine.” That distinction suggests that he wasn’t ridiculing medicine but was ridiculing arrogance and writing from a place of deep knowing and curiosity. His criticism was reserved for those practitioners who were more concerned with their credentials and social strata than the well-being of their patients.

Medicine as performance.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Imaginary Invalid is that the butt of the joke isn’t Argan, it’s his doctors – or perhaps more accurately, the system the doctors represent. Nicole Mak notes that theatre is an apt medium for exploring the trappings of the medical profession. Moliere places “the defining customs and ceremonies of medicine…within the context of physician-patient encounter.” Medicine itself becomes the theatre with the robes, the language, the ceremonies, and the diagnoses all begin to create the appearance of this unquestionable authority long before anyone is actually helped. 

The best example comes in The Imaginary Invalid’s mock medical graduation ceremony. Argan, desperate to feel safe, is offered the opportunity to become a physician himself. During the examination every illness receives essentially the same bleeding, purging, and enema treatment. The examiners enthusiastically approve every answer. While the audience is invited to laugh, they might have a nagging sense that the deeper issue is that the institution and tradition of medicine has become more important than the actual efficacy of practicing it.  

A similar joke appears in The Doctor in Spite of Himself. Sganarelle possesses no medical knowledge whatsoever, yet everyone accepts him as a physician because he just simply looks and sounds like one. His appearance actually becomes his expertise. 

Performance creates authority. We are told he is a doctor so we trust him with our ailments. We don’t investigate further. The laughter comes easily. But when you pull back the layers, a more interesting line of inquiry emerges: What happens when individuals mistake confidence for competence? When does expertise become performance? And how do we know the difference? 

These are the questions that thread throughout Molière’s work. The Imaginary Invalid may place medicine at center stage, but physicians appear throughout his plays, not simply as comic relief, but as symbols of something much larger. They represent authority. They speak with certainty. They rarely admit doubt. This makes them the perfect subjects for satire.

Why it still matters.

Ironically, The Imaginary Invalid became Molière final play. As Bill Irwin notes in his prologue to the adaptation, Molière died after being carried offstage while playing Argan in 1673. The story has become part of theatre lore, but it also reminds us how closely Molière’s art and life became intertwined.  His legacy is not that he simply mocked doctors, but that he asked audiences to think critically about authority at a crucial turning point in medical history. 

Perhaps that’s the reason this play is so relevant for today’s audiences. In a world in which we have to navigate through fake news this play is asking us deeply to question the truth. Molière’s physicians reveal that he did respect medicine while distrusting certainty without curiosity, expertise without humility, and institutes that valued traditions over observations. These questions still remain relevant today. One might come to The Imaginary Invalid to laugh but leave with a deeper curiosity of who and why we trust.