Makers of Modern Medicine

by James J. Walsh

Laennec's burial took place in the cemetery of Ploare. The attendance at the funeral was very large. Practically the entire population of the countryside came to mourn for the benefactor that they loved so much. He had made friends even among the simplest of the country people and knew most of them by name. After his return to the country, he had improved somewhat in appearance, and the neighbors had been very glad to express their feelings of gratitude for his apparent improvement in health. Undoubtedly not a little of this state of better spirits was due to the fact that he liked Brittany and the peasants of the neighborhood so well, and always felt so much at home among them.

He was mild and agreeable in his manners, and of a quiet and even temper. His conversation was lively and full of quiet humor, and his friends often said that they never came away from a conversation with him without having learned something. Toward the end of his life, when his great reputation caused him to be honored by medical men from all over the world, and when his reputation made him the lion of the hour, he lost none of his natural affability and kindness of heart. He was remarkable, especially, for his great kindness and courtesy to foreigners, and he is said to have taken special care to make himself understood by English-speaking medical visitors.

It must be confessed that he was somewhat less popular with his contemporaries who did not belong to his immediate circle of friends and students. One of the reasons for this was his genius, which no generation seems ready to [{161}] acknowledge in any of its members. Another reason was his continued misunderstanding with Broussais. Broussais was the medical theorist of the hour, and medical theories have always been popular, while medical observation has had to wait for due recognition. There were undoubtedly good points in Broussais' theories that Laennec failed to appreciate. This is the only blot on a perfect career, taking it all in all, whether as man or as physician. It can easily be understood with what impatience Laennec, entirely devoted himself to observation, would take up the study of what he considered mere theory, and it is easy to forgive him his lack of appreciation.

Benjamin Ward Richardson says: "It was a common saying regarding Laennec by his compeers that, while he was without a rival in diagnosis, he was not a good practitioner; which means that he was not a good practitioner, according to their ideas of practice, heroic and fearful. To us, Laennec would now be a practitioner very heroic; so much so, that I doubt if any medical man living would, for the life of him, take some of his prescriptions. But in his own time, when so little was known of the great system of natural cure, he would be easily out of court. It was amply sufficient against him that he had a glimmering of the truth as to the existence of a considerable run of cases of organic disease, for which the so-called practice of remedial cure by drugs, bloodlettings and other heroic plans, could do no good but was likely to do grievous harm." We are reminded of Morgagni's refusal to permit bloodletting in his own case, though he practised it himself on others. Like Laennec, Morgagni seems to have doubted the efficacy of bloodletting at a time when unfortunately all medical men were agreed that it was the sovereign remedy.

If Laennec was not popular with his immediate [{162}] contemporaries, succeeding generations have more than made up for the seeming neglect. Less than twenty-five years after his death, Austin Flint, here in America, hailed him as one of the five or six greatest medical men of all times. Forty years after his death, Professor Chauffard, himself one of the distinguished medical men of the nineteenth century, said:

"Without exaggeration we can call the glory which has come to French medicine because of the great discovery of auscultation a national honor. It must be conceded that for a long time before Laennec, the great man of medicine, those to whom medical science owed its ground-breaking work did not belong to France. Harvey, Haller and Morgagni had made the investigations on which are founded the circulation of the blood, experimental physiology, and pathological anatomy, in other lands than ours. It almost seemed that we were lacking in the fecund possibilities of daring and successful initiative. Auscultation, however, as it came to us perfect from the hands of Laennec, has given us a striking revenge for any objections foreigners might make to our apathy. This discovery has rendered the scientific medicine of the world our tributary for all time. It was an immortal creation, and its effects will never fail to be felt. More than this, it will never be merely an historical reminiscence, because of the fact that it guided men aright, but it will in its actuality remain as an aid and diagnostic auxiliary. Auscultation will not disappear but with medical science itself, and with this stage of our civilization which guides, directs and enlightens it."

Laennec was known for his simple Bretagne faith, for his humble piety, and for uniformly consistent devotion to the Catholic Church, of which he was so faithful a member. His charity was well known, and while his purse was very ready to assist the needy, he did not hesitate to give to the [{163}] poor what was so much more precious to him, and it may be said to the world also, than money--his time. After his death, and only then, the extent of his charity became known.

Dr. Austin Flint said of him: "Laennec's life affords an instance among many others disproving the vulgar error that the pursuits of science are unfavorable to religious faith. He lived and died a firm believer in the truths of Christianity. He was a truly moral and a sincerely religious man."

Of his death, his contemporary, Bayle, who is one of his biographers, and who had been his friend from early youth, said:

"His death was that of a true Christian, supported by the hope of a better life, prepared by the constant practice of virtue; he saw his end approach with composure and resignation. His religious principles, imbibed with his earliest knowledge, were strengthened by the conviction of his maturer reason. He took no pains to conceal his religious sentiments when they were disadvantageous to his worldly interests, and he made no display of them when their avowal might have contributed to favor and advancement." Surely in these few lines is sketched a picture of ideal Christian manhood. There are those who think it wonderful to find it in a man of genius as great as Laennec. It should not be surprising, however, for surely genius can bow in acknowledgment to its Creator.