JEAN-LOUIS PETIT
(1) “The man, whose case history I am about to relate, said that the symptoms from which he had suffered, during the preceding twelve months, were the following: a frequent but dry cough, with loss of appetite; almost constant thirst; difficulty in obtaining sleep; night-sweats, more marked in the region of the head and neck than elsewhere; and irregular chills and fever. The physicians whom he had consulted were led to believe that he was affected with consumption, and they treated him in accordance with this belief, but so far without success.—On examination I found that two of his teeth were carious, and I advised their extraction. A rapid restoration of the patient’s health followed in less than a fortnight.”
(2) “The late Princess of Condé had interested herself greatly in a young girl whom she had taken into her service. Upon her return to Paris she took the girl with her, in the hope that the physicians of that city would be able to cure her of the hemicrania (‘Migraine’) from which the girl had frequently suffered during the preceding five years. Bloodletting was the remedy adopted at that period for nearly every malady, and these Paris physicians let her have a full taste of this remedy, prescribing in rather rapid succession twenty such bleedings, the arm, the foot and the region of the throat being the localities selected for this operation. Medical students were thought to be quite sufficiently competent for the management of the arm and foot bloodlettings, but it was I who was obliged to officiate when it became necessary to carry out the bleeding from the neck. As this was the first occasion on which I saw the patient I asked her a number of questions in order to learn the more important facts concerning her malady; and then, failing to discover any that seemed to me to justify the numerous bleedings to which she had been subjected, I examined her mouth, not as a casual matter, but because she had told me about having experienced a sense of heaviness and numbness in her lower jaw. Observing some irregularity in the arrangement of her teeth I counted them, and discovered that there were eighteen instead of the sixteen which are usually present; and it also seemed to me that the second molar tooth on each side was crowding the others. After stating these facts to the Princess, and obtaining her approval of the step which I proposed to carry out, I had the two molars extracted; whereupon, to the great astonishment of her ladyship and all of us, the girl found herself, at the end of twenty-four hours, entirely cured of a malady which had often, during the preceding five or six years, been so distressing that she could not perform her regular duties.” (Copied from Petit’s “Traité des Maladies Chirurgicales,” etc.)
(3) In another part of the same volume Petit reports in detail the history of a case of middle-ear inflammation in which, after the lapse of a few weeks, there developed symptoms that pointed very strongly to the presence of a subdural collection of pus behind and above the inflamed middle-ear. Whereupon, at a consultation that was held between the physicians in attendance upon this patient, Petit urged the desirability of trephining the skull in order to give vent to the contents of this assumed abscess. Such a proposition, however, was promptly voted down by the other consultants. (The events here described, it should be remembered, occurred somewhere between 1750 and 1774.) Two or three weeks later, the patient’s pain having become in the meantime more severe, the timid consultants at last withdrew their opposition, and Petit performed the trephining with success. Much foul-smelling pus was evacuated, and after the lapse of a few weeks the patient was pronounced cured.
It would be easy to furnish here, from the printed record already mentioned, additional instances showing the courage, wisdom and skill exhibited by J. L. Petit in his practice of the art of surgery. But the instances already cited amply suffice, as it appears to me, to show the admirable character of the man and his right to be considered the worthy successor of Ambroise Paré.
Petit’s death occurred in 1760.
Petit made comparatively few contributions to medical literature, and of these the shorter ones will be found in the “Journal des Savants,” the “Recueil des Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences,” and the “Mémoires de l’Académie Royale de Chirurgie.” His great work, which was published in three volumes at Paris in 1774 (also a later edition in 1790), bears the title: “Traité des Maladies Chirurgicales et des Opérations qui leur Conviennent.”
Raphael-Bienvenu Sabatier was born at Paris on October 11, 1732. His father, Pierre Sabatier, was one of the earliest members of the Académie Royale de Chirurgie, and it was therefore quite natural that Raphael chose medicine for his profession. There was nothing remarkable about his early career. He worked hard at his studies of anatomy and cultivated at the same time experimental physiology. At the age of twenty-four he succeeded Balleul as Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgery. In 1773 he was made a member of the Académie des Sciences, and a few years later, when the war broke out, he was ordered to report, as a consulting surgeon, at the headquarters of the Army of the North, at Mons. But, his strength not permitting him to perform the duties of this new position for any length of time, he was soon allowed to return to his private practice. Toward the end of his life Napoleon appointed him one of his consulting surgeons, and at about the same period of time the decoration of the Legion of Honor was conferred on him. When the École de Santé was established he accepted the Chair of Operative Surgery. His death occurred on July 19, 1811.
Sabatier was highly esteemed by his professional brethren. Unlike Desault he brought forward no new inventions or methods of treatment, but he constantly sought how he might introduce some little improvement in existing well-established methods. He was not of an enthusiastic temperament and rarely did anything to call forth opposition on the part of his associates. As a consequence he led a most peaceful life.