“I see, Gil Blas, thou hast no longer an aversion to water,” said the physician. “Heaven be praised! thou drinkest it now like nectar! a change that does not at all surprise me, my friend.”
“Sir,” replied Gil Blas, “there’s a time for all things; I would not at present give a pint of water for a hogshead of wine.”
That Le Sage had a very poor opinion of the professors of the art of medicine in his time may be gathered from the following conversation which Gil Blas holds with his employer: “Scarcely a day passed in which we did not visit eight or ten patients each, from whence it may be easily conceived what a quantity of blood was spilt and water drank. But I do not know how it happened, all our sick died. We very seldom had occasion to make three visits to one patient; at the second we were either told that he had just been buried, or we found them at the last gasp; and as I was but a young physician who had not yet had time to be inured to murder, I began to be very uneasy at the fatal events which might be laid to my charge.” And so he at last gave it up, after being threatened with his life by a gallant, whose wife had succumbed to his drastic treatment.
Towards the close of the story Gil Blas has an interview with his former master, who describes to his old pupil the change that had taken place in the practice of medicine in a few years, which forms an interesting account of the transition through which the medical art was passing towards the end of the seventeenth century.
“Ah, my son,” says the worthy doctor, “what a change has happened in physic within these few years. There are in this city, physicians, or such as call themselves so, who are yoked to the triumphal car of antimony—currus triumphalis antimonii. Truants from the school of Paracelsus, adorers of kermes, accidental curers who make the whole science of medicine consist in knowing how to prepare chymical drugs. What shall I tell you! Everything is turned topsy-turvey in their method. Bleeding at the foot, for example, hitherto so seldom practised, is now almost the only bleeding in use. Those purgatives which were formerly gentle and benign are now changed for emetics and kermes.
“I published a book against this brigandage of medicine, but it was no use. The surgeons, mad with ambition of acting as physicians, think themselves sufficiently qualified when there is nothing to be done but to give kermes and emetics, to which they add bleeding at the foot, according to their own fancy. They even proceed so far as to mix kermes in apozems and cordial potions; and so they are on a par with your celebrated prescribers. This contagion has spread also among the cloisters. There are some monks who act both as apothecaries and surgeons. These apes of medicine apply themselves to chemistry, and compose pernicious drugs, with which they abridge the lives of the reverend fathers.”
The doctor describes the dawn of pharmacy in France and Spain, which was first practised by the surgeons who became surgeon-apothecaries. The use of emetics in medical treatment came largely into vogue in 1658. It is said that the life of Louis XIV. was saved by an emetic administered by Dusausoi, in opposition to the opinion of Vallot, the chief physician to the king.