—Gautier de Conisi.
[6] In the Miracles de Saint Louis we find the history of a cure effected through the royal touch. This cure affords an illustration of how the monks wrote medicine in the thirteenth century. The disease resulted in this patient from white swelling of the left knee. The following is the veracious chronicle:
“About the year of Our Savior 1174, before the Feast of St. Andre, one Jehan Dugue of the town of Combreus, in the Diocese of Orleans, was attacked by inflammation of the left leg near the knee. Several openings were observable in the flesh, which was soft and rotten above and below the joint.”
[7] Bachelor was in other times a title of chivalry or a University degree. The word was derived from the Latin Bachalarius. The word was not introduced into France until the sixteenth century. Under the name bachelor or bachelard were afterwards known all young men in the army studying the profession of arms, or sciences or arts.
[8] See the oath taken by Christian apothecaries and those that fear God, prescribed by the Procureur General, Jean de Resson, Institutions Pharmaceutique, 1626.
[9] Before modern times medicated baths were not held in favor; the sand and iron baths, so highly extolled by Scribonius and Herodotus, of Rome, were unknown in France. Sulphur baths were recommended in the eleventh century, by Gilbert, of England, in dropsy and other cachectic affections; and by Arnauld de Villeneuve, in cases of stone in the bladder. Mineral water baths did not come into use really until the sixteenth century. Hubert praised the waters of Bourboune in 1570, and Pidoux those of Pougnes in 1584. The waters of Auvergne and the Pyrennees were first described in the seventeenth century, as well as those of Aix and of De Begnols, in Genanden.
[10] Procopius, the Greek historian, born at Cæsarea in the year 500, left behind him numerous works, among which may be enumerated L’Histoire de son temps, in eight volumes (Procopii Cæsariensis Historia sui temporibus). This history of the times by Procopius gives a full description of the Plague, and is one of the chef d’oeuvres of medical literature, one that will never be excelled. In this work nothing being omitted, not even the different clinical forms, it is truly classical.
[11] Georgius Florentius Gregorius, Historia Francorum, de 417 591 A.D.
[12] Anglada: Etude sur les Maladies eteintes et les Maladies Nouvelles.
[13] Traduction de Laurent Joubert de Montpellier.