It was this same sentiment of humanity which led Rabelais to give disinterested services to syphilitics, that unfortunate class of sick whom the majority of doctors disdained to treat in the sixteenth century. In 1538 he went to Paris and made great efforts to reform the treatment to which such patients were barbarously subjected; the number of such sufferers was great. He works this fact into the description that Epistemon gives of Hell, “where, not counting Pope Sextus, there are five millions of poxed devils, for there is as much pox in one world as in the other.” But Rabelais, alas for modern theories, did not fish in the ether with hook and line for microbes, while holding the white hands of Venus.
It was Rabelais, then, who pleaded the cause of these poor poxed patients, attacked by mercury as well as the syphilis, and who exclaims: “How often I have seen them when they were anointed and greased with mercurial ointment; their faces as sharp as a butcher knife and their teeth rattling like the key-board of a broken-down organ or the creaking motion of an old spinnet.”
It is evident he employed sweating baths, however, since it is evidently proved by that passage from the redoubtable “Pantagruel’s” nativity: “For all sweat is salt, as is evidenced if you but taste your own sweat, or, a better experiment still, try that of pox patients when they are being sweated.”
We know, besides, that G. Torella, affirms that “the best methods of curing pox is to make the patient sweat near a stove or hot oven for fifteen consecutive days, while fasting meantime.”
Syphilis, as already remarked, was exceedingly common in the sixteenth century, as will be found by referring to the writings of Italian and French specialists of that epoch. Rabelais corroborates this fact, for he frequently alludes to this malady in his works; according to our illustrious author great personages were not exempt from the disease, not even the Pope and the Sacred College of Rome, not even kings and princes, in fact all the nobility, for we read in chapter seventeen of “Pantagruel”: “Moreover, Pope Sextus gave me fifteen hundred pounds of rents on his domains for having cured His Holiness of la bosse chancreuse, which so much tormented him that he feared to be crippled all his life.” Now, a protuberant chancre was nothing but an inguinal bubo, whose suppuration was considered as a favorable symptom of the disease.
Even the good “Pantagruel” did not escape, more than others, the fashionable contagion of his time, for we read: “Pantagruel was taken sick, and his stomach was so disordered that he could neither eat nor drink; and as misfortunes never come singly, he was seized with a clap, which tormented him more than you would think, but his physician succored him well, and by means of drugs, lenitive and diuretic, they caused him to urinate away his misfortune (pisser son malheur). And his urine was so hot that since that time it has never grown cold, and there are different places in France where he left his mark, now called the hot baths, as, for instance, at Cauterets, Limoux, Dax, Balaruc, Neris, and Bourbon-Lancy.”[105]
The chapters of Rabelais’ famous book which most evidence his medical knowledge are those discussing the perplexities of Panurge on the question of marriage. Pantagruel has long commented pro and con, but has not fully made up his mind; he does not demand a solution of the matrimonial problem from Gods, dreams, nor from the oracles of Sibyls. He, however, consents to take council from Herr Trippa, allegorical name bestowed by Rabelais on the German Camilla Agrippa, of Neterheim, a philosopher and physician best known by his books on alchemy, magic, and occult science. This savant proposed to unveil our heroes’ future destiny by “pyromancy, æromancy, hydromancy, gyromancy”; or, better still, by “necromancy I will make a spirit rise from the dead, like Apollonius of Tyana to Achilles, like the Witch of Endor to Saul, who will tell you all, even as Erichto, dead and rotten in body, rose in spirit and predicted to Pompey the issue of the battle of Pharsalia.”[106]
Panurge always refuses, but finishes by taking advice from a priest, physician, lawyer, and philosopher, who elucidate the question. The consultation with the physician Rondibilis, that is to say, the author’s friend Guillaume Rondelet, fellow student of Rabelais at the University of Montpellier, is particularly interesting to all doctors by reason of the anatomical and physiological arguments.
The good physician Rondibilis thus responds to Panurge on the question of marriage:
“You say that you feel within yourself the sharp pricking stings of sensuality. I find in our Faculty of Medicine, and we found our opinion on the ideas enunciated by the ancient Platonists, that carnal concupiscence is controlled in five manners.