The Imaginary Invalid

"Molière struggled with his health for several years before he wrote this play — he had a terrible cough and difficulty breathing, especially in the damp, smoky Parisian winters. In this play, he wrote the central role of Argan, the ‘imaginary invalid’ of the title, for himself. Argan is frustrating and cantankerous, always trying different doctors and treatments and then abandoning them when they don’t bring him relief. This was obviously something Molière had personal experience of, and he had written plays satirising the medical profession before: 1665’s L’Amour médecin , for instance, features five doctors who were based on real-life Parisian physicians, each with their own idiosyncrasy mercilessly satirised by the playwright. Le malade imaginaire is meant to be a comedy, so there’s plenty of bodily humour and farcical action as Argan’s frivolous second wife tries to secure her inheritance. There’s also a romantic sub-plot, as Argan tries to marry his daughter off to a doctor so that he will always have a free medical attendant in the family. The play ends in the kind of musical dance interlude that was traditional in late 17th century drama, with Argan getting himself “certified” as a doctor because there is no one more qualified to practice medicine than a hypochondriac and no disease will dare kill off a doctor. “A few hours before Molière died, he had convinced an entire theatre that he was perfectly fine” Although a comedy, this play has come to have a tragic resonance for me, because it was Molière’s last play. During the fourth ever performance, Molière was taken ill while acting onstage as Argan, racked with terrible coughs. He managed to pass it off as part of the character, but after the play was over he collapsed and had to be carried in a litter to a colleague’s lodgings nearby. He died there a few hours later, choking on his own blood. Just a few hours before, he had convinced an entire theatre’s worth of people that he was perfectly fine, just a hypochondriac. I think this is an extreme example of how a lot of people with health anxiety feel all the time: it’s just hypochondria until something serious shows itself, by which time it’s too late."