ABSTRACT
Was Father Jean-Joseph Surin (1600-1665) a “madman” punished by Jesus Christ for taking His name in vain, as Surin’s contemporary Father Babinet proclaimed, or was his illness the effect of a profound melancholy that had assailed him, as the physician Marc Duncan believed? Was Surin the victim of a diabolical influence over his body and mind? Was he an “obsessive,” as Father Claude Bastide claimed and as Surin himself confirmed in his self-portrait? The difficulty that both Surin and his contemporaries had in grasping the nature of his illness, and the preponderant interest it attracted at the time, were expressed in a variety of medical treatises, religious writings, and oral explanations, whose aim in every case was to argue one of these theses.1 In his partly autobiographical Science expérimentale (Experimental science) – written in 1663 but published only two centuries after his death – Surin invokes the mystery surrounding the nature of his illness, which resulted in “some even going looking for a race and a horoscope and, through observations of what had happened in my youth, finally concluding … [that] there was no reason to hope that things would change for the better… . Most men, even the wisest among them, tended to say it was only a melancholic humor, or a devout illusion, or a fantasy.”2
