The Catholic World Volume Ii Part 103

The misfortune was that there must of necessity be some contrast between this theoretical n.o.bility and the practical life of the physician. He must, if he would gain his living, go from house to house indiscriminately, and receive his pay from all cla.s.ses, like the butcher or the baker. The doctors endeavored to smooth over this anomaly by affecting considerable state. They might be seen threading the streets of Paris mounted on mules, in large wigs and with ample beards. The mule gave an almost episcopal air. "The beard is more than half the doctor," says Toinette, in the _Malade Imaginaire_, When the fashionable Guenaut took to a horse, it raised quite a scandal, which Boileau has commemorated:

"Guenaut, sur son cheval, en pa.s.sant m'eclabousse."

Many, not satisfied with this degree of state, paid their visits in the long magisterial robe, with scarlet hose and band, the famous _rabat_, to which Pascal wittily alludes when he says, "Who could place any confidence in a doctor without a _rabat_?" Not only were the doctors careful to uphold their dignity by these forms, but the Paris Faculty was extremely jealous in maintaining its exclusive position.

Its members not merely refused, as was natural, to meet in consultation any of the host of quacks with which the capital swarmed, and who found frequent access to the houses of the great lords and ladies, often as sceptical in regard to orthodox pract.i.tioners as they were credulous in the extreme of the pretensions of these heretical interlopers, but they likewise stood aloof from men as respectable as themselves--the honorable doctors of Montpellier, of whom perhaps a few words anon. In the meantime we will take a hasty glance at the members of the Paris Faculty apart from their official life; for they were men after all, and did not always figure in wig and gown. They must have had their private as well as public existence; but it is a more difficult task to obtain a sight of them _en deshabille_.

In history, of course, it were vain to seek anything beyond the record of public events; and even the contemporary memoirs of the age of the Grand Monarque tell us more about the court and its festivities, the _reunions_ of the wits of the day, and the current gossip and scandal of the hour, than about the ordinary domestic life of any cla.s.s, particularly of such as ranged below the aristocratic level. We are too apt to believe, from the revelations that are made in the light literature of the time, that the brilliant surface of the Augustan age of France concealed a general ma.s.s of corruption in the higher cla.s.ses, and of misery in the lower. But this would be a false conclusion. The _bourgeoisie_, as a body, were complete strangers to the ferment of ambition and intrigue so rife in the upper strata of society. They had their own interests, their own pursuits, and were in the main an industrious and worthy cla.s.s, sufficiently independent to be able often to regard those above them with a secret, and not always undeserved, contempt. To confine ourselves, however, to the doctors.

Two courses were open to them. They might shut themselves up within the round of their own immediate occupations and studies, and limit themselves to the social circle of their colleagues and compeers. The faculty, as we have seen, was a little community in itself, with its own traditions, laws, distinctions, glories. Here, satisfied with their moderate gains, the doctors might preserve their independence {683} and live in all security and honor; or, on the other hand, they might try their fortune in the world and seek the favor of the great.

The enterprise involved a certain loss of liberty and a corresponding detriment to that nice delicacy of feeling which is the guardian of severe probity. There were doctors of both kinds; those of the first cla.s.s were by far the most numerous. The others were the richest; but the esteem in which they were held by their brethren was in the inverse ratio to the wealth acquired by this compromise of dignified independence.

The ill.u.s.trious dean, Guy Patin, who enjoyed an immense reputation in his day, furnishes an example of the life of voluntary isolation and of practical activity systematically confined to professional or scientific subjects. He is now remembered chiefly for that on which he probably least valued himself--his epistolary correspondence, never designed for publication, but which is extremely interesting, not only as a record of events great and small, the memory of which has long pa.s.sed away, but for the freshness both of ideas and style for which it is remarkable. These letters exhibit Guy Patin as an apparent compendium of contradictions--a believer in medicine, a sceptic in almost all else; obstinately tenacious of the privileges of the faculty, but full of liberal, and even republican, aspirations; confident in the steady advance of science, but always railing at modern times and extolling the past. Yet there is a clue to many of these seeming contradictions; Guy Patin was a dean. Before he was dean, you felt that he would be dean; later, he has been dean. He has studied minutely all the details of the organized inst.i.tution to which he is indebted for all that he is--he has made its spirit and doctrine his own; for the faculty _has_ a doctrine. The experimental method is newer in medicine than in the other sciences. In the seventeenth century we find in its place simple observation guided by theory; which theory was no other than that of the father of medicine, Hippocrates--viz., that nature tends to a cure, and that disease is but an outward manifestation of a salutary effort of the vital organization to counteract the destructive causes at work. The physician's part was to aid this process rather than to interfere with it. This view, we may observe, is finding favor anew in certain quarters in our own day; and we may perhaps be allowed humbly to express an instinctive leaning toward any theory of which the practical result might be a system of comparative non-intervention.

But this by the way. Certainly Hippocrates's fundamental principle did not deter medical pract.i.tioners of the olden time from much painful interference with the workings of nature under the plea of a.s.sistance; a course to which their elaborate doctrine concerning the humors of the body--which, however, they did _not_ derive from Hippocrates, but of which the germ exists in the other great authority, Galen--much contributed.

The period we are considering was one of transition. Men felt the need of progress; and this feeling evoked a number of medical adventurers--the revolutionists, as we may call them, of medicine.

Placed between two opposite systems--the one resting on tradition and on principles, at any rate, in great measure sound; the other calling itself progress, but having nothing to allege save a number of vague aspirations and antic.i.p.ations, some genuine discoveries mingled with much baser metal, and half-truths obscured by palpable error--can we wonder that the faculty should be tempted to confound all novelties in one sweeping act of reprobation, and intrench itself in a state of obstinate opposition? Guy Patin shared this feeling, though not to excess. He was no enemy, as we have said, to a wise and safe progress; but he had the shallowness and narrowness which belongs to a certain range of cleverness. He was not the man to accept anything new which it required {684} breadth, elevation, and comprehensiveness of mind to discern. He had also his favorite theory of simplicity; and this made him suspicious of aught which seemed at variance therewith. He looked askance, for instance, at Harvey and the circulation of the blood. We have said that Guy Patin was a sceptic, yet he was not an unbeliever.

His language certainly is often extremely irreverent; but just as he sometimes speaks in terms bordering on modern liberalism, while all the time, by his attachment to medical traditions, to the faculty, and to monarchy, he is securely anch.o.r.ed in respect for antiquity and authority, so is it as regards religion, and we must not conclude from his free expressions that he is a decided freethinker. Nevertheless it must be confessed that he betrays a very uncatholic mind and temper; and as we cannot believe that he stood alone in this respect, it may serve as an indication of the spirit of many of his order, and of the prevalence of opinions which were later to bear such bitter fruit.

Guy Patin was content with his sphere; he had no desire to overstep it. His friends and intimates were from amongst his own medical brethren, or they were members of the legal and magisterial body. By marriage he was connected with the latter cla.s.s; and moreover there was always a close a.n.a.logy of manners and sentiments betwixt the medical body and the _n.o.blesse de robe_. To his friendship with the President de Thou, brother to Cinq Mars' unfortunate accomplice, we may attribute much of his animosity to the minister Richelieu. Guy Patin is, in short, a systematic grumbler, a regular _frondeur_; but it is chiefly in talk and speculation. He is in reality no revolutionist. Speaking of his frequent social meetings with two lawyer friends, he observes: "Our conversation is always gay. If we talk of religion or of state affairs, it is always historically, without dreaming of either reformation or sedition. We converse chiefly on literary subjects. With a mind thus recreated, I return home, where, after some little converse with my books, or with the record of some past consultation, I retire to rest."

Such was the honorable position of an independent member of the faculty. But what was the condition and social estimate of those who sought the favor of the n.o.bility? Undoubtedly their standing was much inferior to that which they came to occupy a hundred years later--thanks to the spread of the utilitarian spirit, which raised all the positive sciences into high esteem. In the eighteenth century fine ladies had their pet physician, as they had their philosophic or poetic _protege_; but in the seventeenth a great personage thought he conferred much honor on a doctor by seeking a cure at his hands. The n.o.bles were glad, it is true, to have their familiar physician; though the physician, if he had any self-respect, must have felt that he paid rather dear for admission to this familiarity, not to speak of the actual large sums by which, in the case at least of princes of the blood-royal, they had to buy their offices. But we are here chiefly speaking of a less aspiring cla.s.s, who angled for the casual good graces of the aristocratic order. See how Madame de Sevigne speaks of the doctors, whom she is always consulting and always unmercifully quizzing. See her malicious pleasure when she can get four or five together to discuss her bile, her spleen, her humors, when she would ply them with questions and contrive to make them contradict each other. She talks of the profession as a humbug, yet she never pa.s.ses through a town without consulting what she calls "the chief ignoramuses of the place." She consults them, and then turns them into ridicule. They know this, and take their legitimate revenge in high charges. But strange to say, although so contemptuous toward the privileged doctors, Madame de Sevigne has quite a weakness for all quacks or unlicensed dabblers in the {685} art, and is even credulous in their regard. However, it would seem that science with this lively lady is not the sole requirement. "My dear," she says, speaking of a certain elegant Signor Antonio, an Italian son of AEsculapius, "he is twenty-eight years old, with the most beautiful and charming face I ever saw. He has Madame de Mazarin's eyes, and his teeth are perfection. The rest of his face is what you might conceive Rinaldo's to have been, with large black curls, altogether making the prettiest head in the world. He is dressed like a prince, and is a thorough _bon garcon_." We are a long way off the wigs and _rabats_, it will be seen; but we have got a clue to the secret. It is the _medecin bon garcon_ Madame de Sevigne is in search of. She finds him at the baths--_les eaux_. He has none of the pedantry, possibly little of the science, of his Paris brethren of the faculty. He is a man of the world, and can sacrifice to the graces. Medically, his part seems restricted to drenching and dosing his patients with hot water. Tired of court amus.e.m.e.nts, they fly to the _douche_ and the vapor-bath to expel those inward vapors of which Frenchwomen, and indeed our own great-grandmothers, complained so much. Madame de Sevigne goes through this ordeal perseveringly; but she has her alleviations. "My doctor"--this is another pet _bon garcon_--"is very good. Instead of resigning myself to two hours' _ennui_, inseparable from _la suerie_(the sweating process) I make him read to me. He knows what life is; he has no trickery about him; he deals with medicine like a gentleman (_en galant homme_); in short, he amuses me."

At court the doctors had more serious trials. Beside the task of pleasing this or that capricious and exacting patron, they had to beware of displeasing twenty others. The princes of the blood shared with the sovereign the right to choose their own physician from any quarter they pleased, who became forthwith invested _ipso facto_ with all the privileges of the Paris faculty. Possibly, to make a little display of authority, they would often decline selecting him from the honored precincts of the Rue de la Bucherie, and perhaps take a doctor of Montpellier. Hence interminable jealousies. Then the doctors would sometimes be drawn into mixing themselves with party politics, and get into the Bastille; but this was their own fault. To escape the shaft of ridicule was more difficult. It appears certain that in _L'Amour Medecin_ Moliere ventured upon satirizing four of the court physicians under a.s.sumed names; and this in the presence of the king himself, before whom the piece was played. Possibly Louis, whose docility to his physicians stands in remarkable contrast with his lofty distance toward others, might not be sorry to indulge occasionally in a laugh at his masters, or have a brief fling of independence, like a truant schoolboy. Of his habitual bondage to their authority we have the record in a journal of the royal health, magnificently bound in folio and besprinkled _fleurs-de-lis_, which has been preserved. It was begun in 1652 at the desire of the boy-sovereign himself--who thus gave early tokens of his methodical tastes--and it was kept up till four years previous to his death, when it suddenly ceases, possibly because even the pen of flattery became unable to disguise the approaches of inevitable death. The whole is in the handwriting of Louis' three successive physicians, Valot, Daquin, and f.a.gon. No man, it is said, is a hero to his _valet de chambre_; still less, we may imagine, to his apothecary. That the king should have to submit to all those medical appliances which in Moliere's pages are recorded in such plain terms was perhaps a necessity--judged at least to be so; but that etiquette should require that the whole court should be regularly apprised of all these details, is a little surprising. {686} The diary is, however, interlarded with no small amount of flattery. Valot inaugurates his office, for instance, by a memoir on the king's temperament, which was that of which "heroes are made;" and all is in the same adulatory and stilted style. But the writer is by no means unsparing of self-laudation. It is with much evident self-complacency that he registers for the benefit of posterity the different remedies with which "heaven inspired him" to prescribe for the preservation of a health so precious. "Plaster for the king," "potion for the king,"

and so on, figure in large characters. He can also play the prophet, and announce coming measles, dysenteries, etc., _from which the king is to be exempt_. There are temporary interruptions to Valot's absolute rule; these were the seasons when Louis was campaigning; the monarch on these occasions despised the care of his health, and threw physic to the dogs. The doctor groaned and remonstrated, but was fain to await the close of the campaign to resume his authority and make up for lost time. He died in his office. His nephew and successor, Daquin, was a Montpellier doctor and a converted Jew. He was a clever man of moderate science. But he entered on his charge in difficult days. A gouty prince, subject to melancholy, and desirous to abate nothing of his customary attention either to business or amus.e.m.e.nt, is not an easy patient to manage. Beside, the royal valetudinarian met with sundry accidents while under this physician's care. Daquin was an accomplished courtier, and even improved upon Valot in the art of flattery. From him we learn the remarkable fact that "the king is subject, like other men, to catch cold." With all his tact, Daquin did not escape disgrace. Perhaps he made too undisguised a display of his acquisitive disposition; indeed, he was a notorious beggar. It is related that one day Louis, being informed of the death of an old officer, expressed regret, saying that the man had been to him a faithful servant, with the merit, rare in a courtier, of never having asked for anything. While making this observation, he fixed his eyes pointedly on Daquin. The physician, no way disconcerted, naively said, "May one venture to inquire, sire, what your majesty gave him?" The king was silenced, for the bashful courtier in question had never received any royal favor whatsoever. Daquin was dismissed in 1693. He had asked for the archbishopric of Tours for his son. He had so often offended, if offence it were considered, in making bold requests, that it is hardly likely that this application was the real cause of his disgrace. It was probably rather the consequence of the king's rupture with Mme. de Montespen, to whom Daquin owed his elevation. It appears that ever since the king's marriage he had found some difficulty in maintaining his position, from which it is natural to infer that adverse influences were at work; indeed, it was a _protege_, or rather a friend, of Mme. de Maintenon who was promoted to fill his place--a circ.u.mstance corroborative of this supposition. f.a.gon appears to have been a very estimable man, and the attachment and mutual esteem subsisting between him and his patroness, with whom he had first become acquainted in his capacity of physician to the Duc de Maine, never abated. [Footnote 103] He won the confidence also of Louis, and the favor he enjoyed while still in his position of secondary physician was much increased at the period of the king's great illness by a trifling circ.u.mstance which made a strong impression on the monarch's mind. One night all the surgeons and doctors, {687} Daquin included, had ventured to go to bed. The king had taken a _bouillon_, and the fever seemed to be subdued. But f.a.gon, un.o.bserved by the rest, slipped back and took his post in an arm-chair in the ante-room. He was thus at hand to comfort and administer a _tisane_ to the sick monarch, whose fever shortly returned, and who, albeit with the fear of Daquin greatly before his eyes, ventured to accept the services of the attentive subaltern. The _tisane_ sent Louis to sleep, and made f.a.gon's fortune. Three months afterward he was first in command. He deserved his elevation to an office which was a post of no slight honor and profit. [Footnote 104] He bore his honors meekly, and was remarkable for a spirit of disinterestedness as rare as it was creditable to him. f.a.gon closes the list of the court physicians of the seventeenth century, and indeed carries us on into the eighteenth.

All reserve being made in his favor, it must be confessed that the great dramatist's satire was richly deserved by those doctors of royalty, whose ambitious manoeuvres, intrigues, and paltry rivalries were enough to excite the indignation of any honest man.

[Footnote 103: f.a.gon was the nephew of Guy de la Brosse, the founder of the _Jardin du Roi_, now developed into the magnificent Museum of Natural Science and himself also an eminent botanist. He was named professor of botany at this establishment by Valot, who, as first physician to the king, was its superintendent.]

[Footnote 104: The king's physician ranked with the great officers of the crown, and received orders from the sovereign alone, to whom he took an oath of fidelity; and he became a count in virtue of his office, and transmitted his n.o.bility to his children. He was ent.i.tled to the same honors and privileges as the high chamberlain.

He was a councillor of state, and received the usual emoluments.

When he visited the faculty, he was met at the door by the dean, bachelors, and beadles, although he himself might not be a Paris doctor. He had, beside, very extensive authority, enjoying a species of medical jurisdiction throughout the kingdom.]

We have seen that the independent physician, who stood aloof from courting the great, could lead an honorable and tranquil life; but it would be a mistake to conclude that profound peace reigned within the medical corporation itself. On the contrary, it was the scene of a bitter internecine war between the men of the new ideas, the men of progress, and the adherents to tradition and the received system. But to excite men's pa.s.sions ideas must a.s.sume a concrete form, which then becomes at once a rallying-point and a watchword. Such in the seventeenth century were the circulation of the blood and antimony.

Ever since the days of Galen the liver had been held to be the origin of the veins, and of those organs by which blood is transmitted to the whole body. Harvey's announcement accordingly raised a universal commotion in the medical world: perhaps his doctrine would have met with less opposition but for the discovery of the lacteal veins by an Italian anatomist, Gasparo Aselli, in the year 1622. These veins, as most of our readers probably know, originating in the intestines, receive and convey thence the products of digestion--the chyle. Imbued with the doctrine of Galen, and deceived by appearances, Aselli, it is true, believed the liver to be their ultimate destination. Immediately there was one general outcry against these intrusive vessels: their non-necessity was put forward as a conclusive objection--a very common argument, it may be noted, with the old doctors. Really it was not worth upsetting received notions on their account--the lacteal vessels were superfluous. Even Harvey, who was among Aselli's opponents, joined in insisting on this unsatisfactory reason. "It is not _necessary_," he says, "to seek a fresh channel for the transport of the chyle in the lacteal veins." It was evident, he said, that the chyle was carried from the intestines by the mesenteric veins.

But in 1649 Pecquet, a Frenchman, completed the demonstration, by showing that the lacteal veins do not terminate in the liver, but in a reservoir, to which his name was given. Now indeed the liver, and Galen, and the whole edifice of medicine, were threatened; nothing could be deemed sacred any longer. The liver was not the origin of the veins, if the blood careered in a circle, having neither beginning nor end; and the chyle did not go to the liver. {688} "_Quid de nostra fiet medicina?_" was the sorrowful exclamation of one of the doctors of the Montpellier faculty when Pecquet had triumphantly expounded his discovery before them. Ah, there was the difficulty! _Quid de nostra fiet medicina?_ We are condemning our past--an argument which weighs powerfully against all conversions. Nothing can afford stronger evidence of the deep conviction entertained that the whole existing system was at stake, than the opposition of a physician of so much eminence, intellectual and scientific, as Riolan, whom alone of all his adversaries Harvey judged worthy of a rejoinder. It is astonishing, indeed, to see a man of his stamp reduced to throw himself on such arguments as the uselessness and degradation of the liver if the new hypothesis be admitted; to find him urging the impropriety of allowing impure unelaborated chyle to go straight to the heart, which under these circ.u.mstances it must do--thus converting that n.o.ble seat of vital heat into an ign.o.ble kitchen. And then, once there, how was the chyle to be got rid of? An absurd list of suppositions follows, intended to prove, by an exhaustive process, the sheer impossibility of disposing of the chyle after having arrived at such an _impa.s.so_. _Ergo_, the chyle _must_ go to the liver. In fact, it cannot go anywhere else with either reason or propriety. Such are the contemptible arguments to which even superior minds will stoop when they battle against evidence. Harvey, however, found many partisans amongst the Paris faculty. Guy Patin, as we have said, was not of the number: he was not a deep thinker, and trusted his friend Riolan. Harvey's followers were called "circulators." Now "circulator"

in Latin means a charlatan--that is enough for Guy Patin. The debate ceased with Riolan's death: the doctrine had been gradually gaining ground. In 1678 its victory had been achieved when Louis inst.i.tuted at the Jardin des Plantes a special chair of anatomy for propagating the new discoveries.

The battle about antimony raged still more fiercely, inasmuch as the question admitted of less tangible proof. There is a legend that this mineral was first exhibited in a pure state and applied to medical purposes by Basil Valentine, a Benedictine monk of Erfurt, in the beginning of the sixteenth century; he gave it to his hogs, who throve marvellously. This is to be attributed to the a.r.s.enic contained in the drug, which fattens when taken in small quant.i.ties--a fact well known to the peasants of Styria and Lower Austria. Basil next gave it to his monks, who fell sick; from which he drew the following conclusion: "This metal suits hogs; it does not suit monks." Hence its name of antimony. Thirty years later Paracelsus took up the study of antimony, and endeavored to introduce its use, with that of other minerals, in medicine. This would have been to break completely with tradition; but Paracelsus was half-cracked, and not very intelligible. The sixteenth century was the age of alchemy, especially in Germany, where it was ardently pursued, in connection with the occult sciences, by men who rivalled Paracelsus in obscurity. In France transcendental chemistry found less favor, and there was early a split between the pseudo-mystics and the chemists. The former cultivated astrology; but astrology, as an aid to medicine, had quite fallen into disrepute in the seventeenth century, being abandoned to low vagabond quacks.

Chemistry, however, was making gradual progress and striving to establish its place in medicine. The sympathy manifested for this science at Montpellier was quite enough to indispose toward it the faculty of Paris. The absurd blunders into which its a.s.sociation with alchemy had betrayed it in times past weighed also on its reputation; but, above all, the contempt for antiquity manifested by its adepts was calculated to condemn it in the eyes {689} of the majority of the physicians, brought up as they were in reverence for all that chemistry pretended to reform or destroy.

There were not wanting, however, conciliatory spirits, who strove to effect a compromise between the past and the present, and make room for the new chemical theories in the received system. It has already been observed how Galen's theory of the humors of the body had been elaborated: all medical language was grounded upon it. [Footnote 105] Disease was the result of the vitiation of these humors, each humor having its special morbid product. To expel this vitiated humor was the task of the doctor; but why might not minerals be added to his pharmacopoeia, without interfering with his principles? This seemed reasonable; and as a matter of theory the faculty were not unwilling to let it pa.s.s. The difference arose on the practical question. All were agreed that the peccant humor was to be expelled; but the faithful followers of Hippocrates attached great importance to awaiting what was called the _coction_ of the humors. This was the work of nature, which was employed in making an effort which the physician was called only to second,--an effort of which fever was but the symptom. It was esteemed a very nice point to hit off the proper moment, and not prevent or disturb the crisis which was thus preparing: hence the need of mild measures. Whoever will refer to the apothecary's bill in the first scene of Moliere's _Malade Imaginaire_ will see that lenifying, softening, tempering, and refreshing, were the avowed objects of the drugs administered. Such was Hippocratic medicine; mild, at least, in theory. We must make one exception as respects bleeding: these enemies of violent measures bled with a vengeance; they shed torrents of blood. They bled old men of eighty, and babies two months, nay, even two days old; and this "without inconvenience,"--so they said. We presume some of the sufferers survived,--thanks to a strong const.i.tution. Riolan says that there are twenty-four pounds of blood in the human body, and that twenty can be lost without causing death; _ergo_, it is keeping within very reasonable bounds to deprive a man of only the half of his blood.

[Footnote 106]

[Footnote 105: M. Raynaud, to whose amusing work we are again largely indebted, notices that much of this language still survives in the diction of the common people. Many of their ideas and forms of expression still reflect the old doctrine of humorism; just as they have retained many words and idioms now become obsolete in the upper and more shifting strata of society.]

[Footnote 106: The famous Guy de la Brosse refused to be bled. He called bleeding the remedy of sanguinary pedants, and said he would rather die then submit to the operation. "And he did die," says M.

Basalis, a brother doctor; adding, "The devil will bleed him in the next world, has such a rascal and unbeliever deserves." Such are the imprecations hurled at the man who ventured on refusing to die _in proper form_. Could Moliere have written anything more sublimely comic?]

The object of bleeding, of course, was the expulsion of the vitiated humors supposed to be contained in it; but it is hardly reconcilable with the doctrine of waiting for their _coction_ to commence operations by attacking a disease at once with a lancet. But this is one of Guy Patin's primary convictions, as well as of numbers of his brethren, and they conscientiously acted on the same. It was otherwise as respected emetics. Antimony administered in the potent quant.i.ties then used was a most frightful emetic. No one in those days thought of giving infinitesimal doses, or suspected that what was poisonous in large, might be salutary in fractional, proportions. It was reserved for Rasoni to discover that antimony could be thus beneficially administered. And so the whole question lay between those who held as a principle that the peccant humor was not to be expelled till after _coction_, and those who maintained that the sooner the morbific matter was ejected from the system the better.

It is true that the horrible prostration of strength consequent on this summary process was sufficient to alarm men's minds, and furnish a reasonable topic to the opponents of {690} antimony. The quarrel occupied a whole century; of course we cannot attempt to go into even its most elementary details. In 1566, the parliament prohibited the use of this drug. The year 1666 saw it rehabilitated by the same body.

The motive of the first decree was the report of the faculty that antimony was an incorrigible poison. The idea, as we just now observed, that diminution of quant.i.ty might effect what was unattainable by correctives, did not occur to the medical mind of that day. In 1615 there was a fresh unanimous decree against antimony, also indorsed by parliament; but the scientific world was still on the search for a _corrective_, and converts, or perverts, were being secretly made within the very sanctuary of the faculty. In 1638, the dean, Hardoun de Saint-Jacques, suddenly published an incomplete pharmaceutic codex, which had been in course of preparation for twelve years. In this dictionary antimonial wine actually figured in its alphabetical place. How had the enemy contrived to creep into the citadel? No one could say. This incident was the occasion of a deluge of pamphlets, of which the very form and language are, for the most part, like a dead letter to us. Hippocrates, Holy Scripture, history, and the fathers, are all called into court. Even the definition of antimony gives rise to much discussion; and it is gravely argued whether Adam, when conferring names in Paradise, named this drug, and if so, what he called it. Even the troubles of the Fronde did not check this medical civil war. Antimony had quite a literature of its own. Guy Patin, of course, was inimical, but a little cautious while the question of his deanship was impending. Afterward he launches out; he hates chemistry, he hates antimony, he hates Guenaut, who is its warm advocate, and is beside Cardinal Mazarin's physician (Guy Patin is always in political opposition). Guenaut, he says, has poisoned his wife, daughter, and two sons-in-law with this drug; at last he poisons himself, and dies a martyr to his infatuation. And then the faculty have twice condemned antimony. That is more than enough for Guy Patin.

However, a great event turned the balance in his favor. During the campaign of 1658, the king, then twenty years of age, was attacked by typhus. Valot had been absent a few days, sent by Louis, as the journal tells us, to settle a quarrel between the physicians and surgeons who were treating the Marechal de Castelnau for a mortal wound--poor marshal! He hastened back to his master, and fell to work vigorously, sparing neither bleeding nor dosing; but the king got worse, and Guenaut was sent for. The court-physicians--Valot, Esprit, Daquin, Yvelin, beside a local doctor--were all there disputing over the monarch's sinking body. A great consultation is now held, presided over by the cardinal; and he votes for antimony. It was given. The king took an ounce, and marvellous are the recorded effects. However, whether in consequence or in spite of the dose, he recovered. Louis was at that time his people's darling and idol; they adored their young monarch, and he had been saved by Guenaut and antimony! Guy Patin's embarra.s.sment at this crisis is a little ludicrous. The dose, he urges in extenuation, was small; but he concludes that, after all, what saved the king "was his innocence, his youth and strength, nine good bleedings, and the prayers of good people like himself and others." Defections now became numerous, and the faculty was in a false position. In fact, most of the doctors gave antimony in spite of the two decrees, the last of which interdicted the mention of it.

In 1666 the embargo was finally removed, after a tedious and ponderous process, as were all processes in those days, before the parliament; and the doctors were henceforth permitted "to give the said emetic wine for the cure of maladies, to write and dispute about it,"' etc., but it was not lawful for persons to take it {691} without their advice. The question had been decided in the faculty by ninety-two doctors against ten. The decree came to sadden the last days of Guy Patin, and of a few more respectable old stagers, who were unable to advance with their age.

But this internal conflict was not the only one which the faculty had to sustain. There was the perennial dispute with the surgeons. Surgery and medicine are twin sciences, if they be not rather branches of one and the same. Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus, made no practical distinction between them; nevertheless, they came to be entirely separated in mediaeval practice. Two causes may be a.s.signed for this: the first was the quasi-ecclesiastical character of the medical profession in early days, which rendered the shedding of blood and other operations incompatible with the position of men who were either clerics or bound by clerical rules. Still, though they could not themselves draw blood, they could prescribe blood-letting and other sanguinary operations; and this led, of course, to the existence of another cla.s.s, paid to carry out their orders. But a second and far more enduring cause was the strong prejudice existing in feudal times against manual labor as degrading. In vain might the surgeons urge that it was absurd to regard as merely mechanical an occupation which necessitated much scientific knowledge. The university shared the feelings of the faculty on this point; and while admitting the doctors into its fellowship, rejected the surgeons. Excluded from this fraternity of liberal science, the surgeons gave themselves diligently to professional study. As early as the fourteenth century we meet with their celebrated confraternity, placed under the patronage of Sts.

Cosmas and Damian, which boasted of its foundation by St. Louis, and which maintained its existence for five centuries. The quarrel with the doctors began in the middle of the fifteenth century, and terminated only on the eve of the Revolution, when St. Cosmas's College and the faculty were both alike to share the universal shipwreck of all the ancient inst.i.tutions.

The surgeons had long been in the habit of availing themselves of the aid of the barbers in certain ordinary operations, and bleeding was at last entirely abandoned to their hands. Just, however, as the faculty wished to depress the surgeons, and the latter were desirous to raise themselves to an equality with the faculty, so also the surgeons were resolved to keep down their servants the barbers, who, on their part, aspired to rise in the professional scale. The policy of the faculty was to foster their rivalry, and thus keep a check upon both; but as the nearest enemy is always the most dreaded, the time came when it was judged prudent to elevate the barbers, whose very inferiority rendered them less obnoxious, in order the better to make head against the surgeons; and so the faculty adopted the barbers, in whom it hoped to find docile clients, in order to mortify its unsubmissive children.

It magnificently compared this measure to the call of the Gentiles and rejection of ungrateful Israel. But the barbers held their heads up now, and requested to study anatomy. Here was a difficulty. University regulations strictly enjoined that all public lessons should be in Latin; but what was the use of talking Latin to barbers? So the lecture was to be in Latin, and the explanation in French. Apparently to facilitate the comprehension of the cla.s.sic tongue by the unlearned, the use of that whimsical Latin which Moliere has so happily caricatured then first began. A clever compromise was now supposed to have been effected. A doctor was to teach in the amphitheatre of the faculty without touching the body; a surgeon was to dissect; the barbers were to be present, and try to understand.

This was in 1498.

Further concessions followed; and in 1505 the faculty allowed the barbers to be inscribed on the dean's {692} register, and, after pa.s.sing through an examination, to be formally received as scholars.

They paid, however, for their lessons, and took an oath never to prescribe an internal remedy, but to have recourse to the doctors for the medical treatment of their patients. On these conditions the proudest of scientific corporations extended its protection to, and even took into a certain fellowship, a profession not only humble, but so much despised, that in Germany at that period barbers were not admitted into any trade corporation. The credit of the king's barber--an important personage, who enjoyed familiar opportunities for asking favors--had something perhaps to say to the prosperity of this trade in France. And the barbers continued to prosper; it was their interest, indeed, to keep well with the faculty, whose protecting hand once withdrawn, they would helplessly fall back under the cruel bondage of their old masters. But as time went on, they grew confident. The troubles of the League unhinged society, and for some years we find them neglecting to take the oath of fidelity. Meanwhile surgery had attained a proud position, and at the end of the sixteenth century was much in advance of the other sciences, both in its spirit of independent inquiry and in experimental practice.

Many eminent names ill.u.s.trate its annals at this period. At the head of the corporation was Ambroise Pare, the restorer--we might almost say the creator--of modern surgery. He had been a barber's boy in his youth, and still treated his old a.s.sociates with much consideration.

Perhaps this honorable notice helped to turn their heads a little, for they actually began to set up school for themselves, and to maintain theses. This got them a snub from the faculty, and a prohibition from parliament, which recalled to their recollection the ancient statute which permitted their intervention only "_pro furunculis, bocchiis, et apostumatibus_." But the time was past for enforcing such laws; every day the barbers more and more emanc.i.p.ated themselves from thraldom; and in 1629 they obtained the right of having their receptions presided over by the king's barber or by his lieutenant.

The surgeons meanwhile had left no stone unturned to get admission into the university, to have a recognized right to lecture publicly, and to receive the chancellor's benediction. They were several times granted the king's license to this effect; but the university disregarded the royal injunction, and even set at naught a Papal bull which, in 1579, recognized the surgeon's t.i.tle to the chancellor's benediction. There was a consequent _appel comme d'abus_ from that Gallican body to the parliament. Nevertheless, more than one chancellor was found to comply with the Pope's rescript.

Such, then, was the situation of parties in the beginning of Louie XIV.'s reign. Three rival corporations existed; in principle united, but mutually independent. There was the faculty, petrified as it were, in its immobility, demanding from the others a submission it could not obtain; there was the corporation of surgeons, intermediary between the learned bodies and the trading _bourgeoisie_, wearing the gown on days of ceremony, holding examinations, conferring degrees, but keeping shop; [Footnote 107] and there were the barbers, with neither gown nor school, but living at the expense of the two former cla.s.ses, and, by long prescription, freely practising surgery, and even medicine to a certain extent. The reasons for old distinctions had pa.s.sed away--nothing remained but inveterate rivalries. Anatomy was the perpetual theatre for dissension. The surgeons never had resigned themselves to the secondary part allotted to them. They claimed {693} to teach what they understood at least as well as their superiors. But how to get bodies? The dean of the faculty had an exclusive claim to those of all executed criminals, and none other were procurable.

Accordingly, whenever an execution occurred there was a regular scramble for the poor wretch's body. The students of surgery and the barber-apprentices a.s.sembled on the Place de Greve, where they had no difficulty in finding recruits amongst the rabble. Scarcely had the executioner done his work, when these bands, armed with swords and sticks, rushed on the yet warm corpse, which was carried off by the victors to some shop, in which they barricaded themselves against the _marechaussee_. Many of these disgraceful acts went unpunished.

Sometimes the faculty would despatch an official to claim the body; he was always sent about his business; and then recourse was had to law.

The report of an unfortunate _huissier_, who was actor and victim in one of these scenes, may be seen in a _proces-verbal_ of the time. He was sent to seize a body which had been taken to St. Cosmas's. There he found three professors (in cap and gown!) giving an anatomical demonstration to a large audience. He was received with yells, and cruelly beaten. A force coming to his rescue, the students cut up the corpse into bits rather than let the faculty get it.

[Footnote 107: They hang up at their windows as a sign three emblematic boxes, surmounted with a banner bearing the figures of Sts. Cosmas and Damian.]

A common interest and a common hatred of their domineering antagonist ended by drawing together the two inferior orders, and finally led to their reunion. The increasing number of the barbers, unrestrained by any rule, and unrestrainable by any law, threatened to swamp surgery altogether; and so the men of letters made up their minds to extend the hand of fellowship to the artisans, and receive them back, not as slaves any longer, but as brethren. In 1655 the surgeons swallowed this bitter pill; they took upon themselves the shame of uniting with the barbers, and the barbers entered on the privileges of the surgeons. Parliament ratified the contract, and the faculty was scarcely named in the affair. It was left stranded. Its servants, whom it had raised from the dust to do its work and fight its battles, had betrayed it and gone off with arms and baggage to the enemy's camp.

But it was not long without perceiving that it might draw profit from what seemed a discomfiture. The surgeons had conferred their privileges on the barbers; in return they had, of course, accepted the liabilities of their new a.s.sociates. Now the barbers were bound by contract to an oath of fidelity, and other obligations of a pecuniary nature, to the faculty. This body accordingly claimed either that the union effected should be dissolved, or that both companies should be subject to the engagements by which the barbers had bound themselves.

It renewed at the same time all its former claims of supremacy, and its old prohibitions against teaching and conferring degrees, but, above all, against the a.s.sumption of the _cap and gown_.

Three years did this process last, which occupies a voluminous place in the parliamentary registers. The surgeons eventually lost their cause; and that which did not a little contribute thereto was the manifestation of their own miserable internal dissensions. "St. Luke has been stronger than St. Cosmas!" exclaimed the triumphant Guy Patin at the news of this great victory. Seventy-two doctors went in procession, in grand costume, to thank the president, Lamoignon, and the avocat-general, Talon; and in order to testify their special grat.i.tude to the latter, it was decreed that, having well merited of the faculty, he and his family should be attended gratis in perpetuity. A magnificent edition of Hippocrates in five folio volumes was presented along with this decree, inclosed in a silver box. For several days not one of the crest-fallen {694} surgeons was to be seen in the streets, and six of their number, it is said, fell sick. Gladly would they now have dissolved the unhappy _mesalliance_ they had contracted, but it was too late. Both barbers and surgeons, indeed, alike felt that the defeat was final; but on the latter it must have fallen with the most crushing severity. Before the close of the year the chair in which Ambroise Pare had sat--the symbol of departed greatness--was removed. They had to pay the impost, take the oath of fidelity--no humiliation was spared them. Thus forced into a preposterous alliance, which was made the pretext for its degradation, the surgical profession languished for many years. The faculty on this occasion certainly committed its worst fault. For paltry questions of precedence it r.e.t.a.r.ded for a century the progress of surgery, which did not emerge from the inferior position to which the decree of 1660 had reduced it until time and necessity led to a reconst.i.tution of surgery and shaving as two distinct professions. It was then that Louis XV., at the instance of La Peyronie, created the Royal Academy of Surgery, which furnished so many ill.u.s.trious names to science in the eighteenth century, and which would doubtless have extinguished the old faculty if the Revolution had not saved it the trouble by destroying them both.

Our s.p.a.ce forbids us to notice the other great battle of the faculty during the period which has immediately fallen under our consideration--that which it waged and won against the Montpellier doctors. But the Montpellier school would deserve a notice by itself; and the interest which gathers round it has been heightened by the important questions, physiological and philosophical, connected with its name in the present day.

A word or two more, and we have done. When Moliere was about to deal the faculty its most grievous wound, it was triumphant on all sides.

Yet, as a system, it was already doomed to that destruction which had fallen on the whole scholastic method in science prevailing in the middle ages. Hippocrates, it is true, furnished the text-book of medicine, but it was Hippocrates virtually commented by Aristotle, as all the old medical phraseology and medical argumentations abundantly prove. Much of the ridicule attached to that venerable body against which Moliere has raised an inextinguishable laugh had its origin in the retention of this language, with all the quiddities of the schools, and of those curious dialectic exercises which formed the approved method of mental gymnastics in the middle ages long after they had been discarded everywhere else. The rest of the ridicule which falls to the due share of the faculty must be laid to the account of the selfishness, pride, and egotism inherent in human nature, but which always strike us more forcibly when exhibited in a state of things foreign to current ideas and manners.

In conclusion, we would point out what we conceive may be esteemed as a sound point in the system of that day--its treatment of man as a whole. There is no divorce with these old doctors between body and soul. Modern medical science has affected to treat the body apart from any regard to the spiritual portion of man's nature. While allowing the immense progress made in medicine and surgery in modern times, we cannot but feel that a serious error was committed in dividing what our fathers deemed inseparable. The materialistic errors of the eighteenth century, and, in particular, the materialism so prevalent in the learned medical body, are a standing comment on the systems which made clear decks of those fundamental principles which had come down to us from the earliest antiquity, and which had received the sanction of the Christian schools, in whose teaching physiology and psychology were always closely united; the study of the soul crowning {695} that of physiology. We witness with satisfaction a strong reaction amongst many members of the French medical body toward views which harmonize thoroughly with the old doctrine of the Angel of the School, laid down long before those modern discoveries which are beginning slowly to lead men back, not to the pedantry of the olden time, but to those ancient paths from which our fathers would have deemed it heresy to wander.

From The Sixpenny Magazine.

HANDWRITING.

Men, like trees, have a curved line which, touching at the extremities, forms a figure which is the general estimate of their characters. Individual traits are lost in the harmony of them all. The hand may be delicate; the face coa.r.s.e; there may be contradiction between the eye and the brow, between the motive power and the object desired; but still the man is a unity unlike any other man, and yet similar in original traits.