Turquet de Mayerne.
Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, Baron Aulbone of France, was born at Geneva in 1573, of a Calvinistic family and studied for the medical profession first at Heidelberg and afterwards at Montpellier. Moving to Paris he acquired popularity as a lecturer on anatomy to surgeons, and on pharmacy to apothecaries. His inclination towards chemical remedies brought him to the notice of Rivierus, the first physician to Henri IV, and he was appointed one of the king’s physicians. But his medical heterodoxy offended the faculty, and his Protestantism raised enemies for him at court. The king, who valued Turquet, did his best to persuade him to conform to the Church of Rome as he himself had done, and to moderate the rancour of his professional foes. But he was unsuccessful in both efforts. Still Henri tried to keep him, ignoring his heresies, and perhaps rather sympathising with them. But the queen, Marie de Medici, insisted on Turquet’s dismissal, and the Faculty of Paris was no whit behind the queen in intolerance. Coupling him with a quack named Pierre Pena, a foreigner then practising medicine illicitly at Paris, they issued a decree forbidding all physicians who acknowledged their control to consult with De Turquer, and exhorting practitioners of all nations to avoid him and all similar pests, and to persevere in the doctrines of Hippocrates and Galen.
Turquet de Mayerne came to England evidently with a high reputation, for he was soon appointed first physician to the king (James I) and queen, and held the same position under Charles I and Charles II. He seems to have kept in retirement during the Commonwealth, though in 1628 it appears from his manuscript records (“Ephemerides Anglicæ,” he called them) that he was consulted by a “Mons. Cromwell” whom he describes as “Valde melancholicus.” He died at Chelsea in 1655 at the age of 82. It was in England that he used the name of Mayerne.
De Mayerne exercised a considerable influence on English pharmacy. The Society of Apothecaries owed to him their separate incorporation, and the first London Pharmacopœia was compiled and authorised probably to some extent at his instigation. He certainly wrote the preface to it. Paris quotes him as prescribing among absurd and disgusting remedies “the secundines of a woman in her first labour of a male child, the bowels of a mole cut open alive, and the mummy made of the lungs of a man who had died a violent death.” But such remedies were common to all practitioners in England and France at the time. The principal ingredient in a gout powder which he composed was the raspings of an unburied human skull. He devised an ointment for hypochondria which was called the Balsam of Bats. It contained adders, bats, sucking whelps, earthworms, hog’s grease, marrow of a stag, and the thigh bone of an ox. On the other hand, Mayerne is credited with the introduction of calomel and black wash into medical practice.
Van Helmont.
Jean Baptiste Van Helmont, born at Brussels in 1577, and died at Vilvorde near that city in 1644, was an erratic genius whose writings and experiments sometimes astonish us by their lucidity and insight, and again baffle us by their mysticism and puerility.
Van Helmont was of aristocratic Flemish descent, and possessed some wealth. He was a voracious student and a brilliant lecturer. At the University of Louvain, however, where he spent several years, he refused to take any degree because he believed that such academic distinctions only ministered to pride. He resolved at the same time to devote his life to the service of the poor, and with this in view he made over his property to his sister, and set himself to study medicine. His gift of exposition was so great that the authorities of the University insisted on his acceptance of the chair of Surgery, though that was the branch of medical practice he knew least about, and though it was contrary to the statutes of the faculty to appoint a person as Professor not formally qualified.
J. B. Van Helmont. 1577–1644.
(From an engraving in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.)