For it is a fact most melancholy—
Where one is cured two perish in the strife.”
Why the poet of the Roman du Renard was so full of rancor against the doctors of his time is a problem too difficult to solve; yet, while he considered them no better than criminals and dangerous men to society, he did not fail to call a doctor before dying. Physicians, for some strange and unknown reason, have always been criticised by French literary men in modern as well as ancient times. Our French authors have never, as did the masters of Greek poesy, recognized us as brothers in Apollo. Permit me here to call their attention to one of the writers of Greek anthology, who said of physicians:
“The son of Phœbus himself, Æsculapius, has instilled into thy mind, O Praxagorus, the knowledge of that divine art which makes care to be forgotten. He has given into thy hands the balm that cures all evils. Thou, too, hast learned from the sweet Epion what pains accompany long fevers, and the remedies to be applied to divided flesh; if mortals possessed medicines such as thine, the ferry of Charon would not be overloaded in crossing the Styx.”
Notwithstanding sarcasm, in spite of epigrams and calumny, medicine has always been a source of sublime consolation to the sick and afflicted, the sufferer—rich and poor. At all ages the priest has been inclined to indulge in the practice of physic, and it was at their instigation that those nuns known as Sisters of Charity practiced medicine to a certain extent in the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century we see the nuns of the Convent of Paraclet, in Champagne, following the advice of Abelard, essaying the surgical treatment of the sick. It is true the first abbess of this nunnery was Heloise, in whose history conservative surgery is not even mentioned. The nuns who dressed wounds were called medeciennes or miresses. Gaulthier de Conisi has left a history of their good works:
“And the world wondered when it did learn
That woman had found a new mission;
When the doctors of Montpellier and Salern(o)
Saw each nun to be a physician.
A fever they knew, a pulse they could feel,