In history, of course, it were vain to seek anything beyond the record of public events; and even the contemporary memoirs of the age of the Grand Monarque tell us more about the court and its festivities, the réunions of the wits of the day, and the current gossip and scandal of the hour, than about the ordinary domestic life of any class, particularly of such as ranged below the aristocratic level. We are too apt to believe, from the revelations that are made in the light literature of the time, that the brilliant surface of the Augustan age of France concealed a general mass of corruption in the higher classes, and of misery in the lower. But this would be a false conclusion. The bourgeoisie, as a body, were complete strangers to the ferment of ambition and intrigue so rife in the upper strata of society. They had their own interests, their own pursuits, and were in the main an industrious and worthy class, sufficiently independent to be able often to regard those above them with a secret, and not always undeserved, contempt. To confine ourselves, however, to the doctors. Two courses were open to them. They might shut themselves up within the round of their own immediate occupations and studies, and limit themselves to the social circle of their colleagues and compeers. The faculty, as we have seen, was a little community in itself, with its own traditions, laws, distinctions, glories. Here, satisfied with their moderate gains, the doctors might preserve their independence [{683}] and live in all security and honor; or, on the other hand, they might try their fortune in the world and seek the favor of the great. The enterprise involved a certain loss of liberty and a corresponding detriment to that nice delicacy of feeling which is the guardian of severe probity. There were doctors of both kinds; those of the first class were by far the most numerous. The others were the richest; but the esteem in which they were held by their brethren was in the inverse ratio to the wealth acquired by this compromise of dignified independence.
The illustrious dean, Guy Patin, who enjoyed an immense reputation in his day, furnishes an example of the life of voluntary isolation and of practical activity systematically confined to professional or scientific subjects. He is now remembered chiefly for that on which he probably least valued himself—his epistolary correspondence, never designed for publication, but which is extremely interesting, not only as a record of events great and small, the memory of which has long passed away, but for the freshness both of ideas and style for which it is remarkable. These letters exhibit Guy Patin as an apparent compendium of contradictions—a believer in medicine, a sceptic in almost all else; obstinately tenacious of the privileges of the faculty, but full of liberal, and even republican, aspirations; confident in the steady advance of science, but always railing at modern times and extolling the past. Yet there is a clue to many of these seeming contradictions; Guy Patin was a dean. Before he was dean, you felt that he would be dean; later, he has been dean. He has studied minutely all the details of the organized institution to which he is indebted for all that he is—he has made its spirit and doctrine his own; for the faculty has a doctrine. The experimental method is newer in medicine than in the other sciences. In the seventeenth century we find in its place simple observation guided by theory; which theory was no other than that of the father of medicine, Hippocrates—viz., that nature tends to a cure, and that disease is but an outward manifestation of a salutary effort of the vital organization to counteract the destructive causes at work. The physician's part was to aid this process rather than to interfere with it. This view, we may observe, is finding favor anew in certain quarters in our own day; and we may perhaps be allowed humbly to express an instinctive leaning toward any theory of which the practical result might be a system of comparative non-intervention. But this by the way. Certainly Hippocrates's fundamental principle did not deter medical practitioners of the olden time from much painful interference with the workings of nature under the plea of assistance; a course to which their elaborate doctrine concerning the humors of the body—which, however, they did not derive from Hippocrates, but of which the germ exists in the other great authority, Galen—much contributed.
The period we are considering was one of transition. Men felt the need of progress; and this feeling evoked a number of medical adventurers—the revolutionists, as we may call them, of medicine. Placed between two opposite systems—the one resting on tradition and on principles, at any rate, in great measure sound; the other calling itself progress, but having nothing to allege save a number of vague aspirations and anticipations, some genuine discoveries mingled with much baser metal, and half-truths obscured by palpable error—can we wonder that the faculty should be tempted to confound all novelties in one sweeping act of reprobation, and intrench itself in a state of obstinate opposition? Guy Patin shared this feeling, though not to excess. He was no enemy, as we have said, to a wise and safe progress; but he had the shallowness and narrowness which belongs to a certain range of cleverness. He was not the man to accept anything new which it required [{684}] breadth, elevation, and comprehensiveness of mind to discern. He had also his favorite theory of simplicity; and this made him suspicious of aught which seemed at variance therewith. He looked askance, for instance, at Harvey and the circulation of the blood. We have said that Guy Patin was a sceptic, yet he was not an unbeliever. His language certainly is often extremely irreverent; but just as he sometimes speaks in terms bordering on modern liberalism, while all the time, by his attachment to medical traditions, to the faculty, and to monarchy, he is securely anchored in respect for antiquity and authority, so is it as regards religion, and we must not conclude from his free expressions that he is a decided freethinker. Nevertheless it must be confessed that he betrays a very uncatholic mind and temper; and as we cannot believe that he stood alone in this respect, it may serve as an indication of the spirit of many of his order, and of the prevalence of opinions which were later to bear such bitter fruit.
Guy Patin was content with his sphere; he had no desire to overstep it. His friends and intimates were from amongst his own medical brethren, or they were members of the legal and magisterial body. By marriage he was connected with the latter class; and moreover there was always a close analogy of manners and sentiments betwixt the medical body and the noblesse de robe. To his friendship with the President de Thou, brother to Cinq Mars' unfortunate accomplice, we may attribute much of his animosity to the minister Richelieu. Guy Patin is, in short, a systematic grumbler, a regular frondeur; but it is chiefly in talk and speculation. He is in reality no revolutionist. Speaking of his frequent social meetings with two lawyer friends, he observes: "Our conversation is always gay. If we talk of religion or of state affairs, it is always historically, without dreaming of either reformation or sedition. We converse chiefly on literary subjects. With a mind thus recreated, I return home, where, after some little converse with my books, or with the record of some past consultation, I retire to rest."
Such was the honorable position of an independent member of the faculty. But what was the condition and social estimate of those who sought the favor of the nobility? Undoubtedly their standing was much inferior to that which they came to occupy a hundred years later—thanks to the spread of the utilitarian spirit, which raised all the positive sciences into high esteem. In the eighteenth century fine ladies had their pet physician, as they had their philosophic or poetic protégé; but in the seventeenth a great personage thought he conferred much honor on a doctor by seeking a cure at his hands. The nobles were glad, it is true, to have their familiar physician; though the physician, if he had any self-respect, must have felt that he paid rather dear for admission to this familiarity, not to speak of the actual large sums by which, in the case at least of princes of the blood-royal, they had to buy their offices. But we are here chiefly speaking of a less aspiring class, who angled for the casual good graces of the aristocratic order. See how Madame de Sevigné speaks of the doctors, whom she is always consulting and always unmercifully quizzing. See her malicious pleasure when she can get four or five together to discuss her bile, her spleen, her humors, when she would ply them with questions and contrive to make them contradict each other. She talks of the profession as a humbug, yet she never passes through a town without consulting what she calls "the chief ignoramuses of the place." She consults them, and then turns them into ridicule. They know this, and take their legitimate revenge in high charges. But strange to say, although so contemptuous toward the privileged doctors, Madame de Sevigné has quite a weakness for all quacks or unlicensed dabblers in the [{685}] art, and is even credulous in their regard. However, it would seem that science with this lively lady is not the sole requirement. "My dear," she says, speaking of a certain elegant Signor Antonio, an Italian son of AEsculapius, "he is twenty-eight years old, with the most beautiful and charming face I ever saw. He has Madame de Mazarin's eyes, and his teeth are perfection. The rest of his face is what you might conceive Rinaldo's to have been, with large black curls, altogether making the prettiest head in the world. He is dressed like a prince, and is a thorough bon garçon. " We are a long way off the wigs and rabats, it will be seen; but we have got a clue to the secret. It is the médecin bon garçon Madame de Sevigné is in search of. She finds him at the baths—les eaux. He has none of the pedantry, possibly little of the science, of his Paris brethren of the faculty. He is a man of the world, and can sacrifice to the graces. Medically, his part seems restricted to drenching and dosing his patients with hot water. Tired of court amusements, they fly to the douche and the vapor-bath to expel those inward vapors of which Frenchwomen, and indeed our own great-grandmothers, complained so much. Madame de Sevigné goes through this ordeal perseveringly; but she has her alleviations. "My doctor"—this is another pet bon garçon—"is very good. Instead of resigning myself to two hours' ennui, inseparable from la suerie(the sweating process) I make him read to me. He knows what life is; he has no trickery about him; he deals with medicine like a gentleman (en galant homme); in short, he amuses me."
At court the doctors had more serious trials. Beside the task of pleasing this or that capricious and exacting patron, they had to beware of displeasing twenty others. The princes of the blood shared with the sovereign the right to choose their own physician from any quarter they pleased, who became forthwith invested ipso facto with all the privileges of the Paris faculty. Possibly, to make a little display of authority, they would often decline selecting him from the honored precincts of the Rue de la Bûcherie, and perhaps take a doctor of Montpellier. Hence interminable jealousies. Then the doctors would sometimes be drawn into mixing themselves with party politics, and get into the Bastille; but this was their own fault. To escape the shaft of ridicule was more difficult. It appears certain that in L'Amour Médecin Molière ventured upon satirizing four of the court physicians under assumed names; and this in the presence of the king himself, before whom the piece was played. Possibly Louis, whose docility to his physicians stands in remarkable contrast with his lofty distance toward others, might not be sorry to indulge occasionally in a laugh at his masters, or have a brief fling of independence, like a truant schoolboy. Of his habitual bondage to their authority we have the record in a journal of the royal health, magnificently bound in folio and besprinkled fleurs-de-lis, which has been preserved. It was begun in 1652 at the desire of the boy-sovereign himself—who thus gave early tokens of his methodical tastes—and it was kept up till four years previous to his death, when it suddenly ceases, possibly because even the pen of flattery became unable to disguise the approaches of inevitable death. The whole is in the handwriting of Louis' three successive physicians, Valot, Daquin, and Fagon. No man, it is said, is a hero to his valet de chambre; still less, we may imagine, to his apothecary. That the king should have to submit to all those medical appliances which in Molière's pages are recorded in such plain terms was perhaps a necessity—judged at least to be so; but that etiquette should require that the whole court should be regularly apprised of all these details, is a little surprising. [{686}] The diary is, however, interlarded with no small amount of flattery. Valot inaugurates his office, for instance, by a memoir on the king's temperament, which was that of which "heroes are made;" and all is in the same adulatory and stilted style. But the writer is by no means unsparing of self-laudation. It is with much evident self-complacency that he registers for the benefit of posterity the different remedies with which "heaven inspired him" to prescribe for the preservation of a health so precious. "Plaster for the king," "potion for the king," and so on, figure in large characters. He can also play the prophet, and announce coming measles, dysenteries, etc., from which the king is to be exempt. There are temporary interruptions to Valot's absolute rule; these were the seasons when Louis was campaigning; the monarch on these occasions despised the care of his health, and threw physic to the dogs. The doctor groaned and remonstrated, but was fain to await the close of the campaign to resume his authority and make up for lost time. He died in his office. His nephew and successor, Daquin, was a Montpellier doctor and a converted Jew. He was a clever man of moderate science. But he entered on his charge in difficult days. A gouty prince, subject to melancholy, and desirous to abate nothing of his customary attention either to business or amusement, is not an easy patient to manage. Beside, the royal valetudinarian met with sundry accidents while under this physician's care. Daquin was an accomplished courtier, and even improved upon Valot in the art of flattery. From him we learn the remarkable fact that "the king is subject, like other men, to catch cold." With all his tact, Daquin did not escape disgrace. Perhaps he made too undisguised a display of his acquisitive disposition; indeed, he was a notorious beggar. It is related that one day Louis, being informed of the death of an old officer, expressed regret, saying that the man had been to him a faithful servant, with the merit, rare in a courtier, of never having asked for anything. While making this observation, he fixed his eyes pointedly on Daquin. The physician, no way disconcerted, naively said, "May one venture to inquire, sire, what your majesty gave him?" The king was silenced, for the bashful courtier in question had never received any royal favor whatsoever. Daquin was dismissed in 1693. He had asked for the archbishopric of Tours for his son. He had so often offended, if offence it were considered, in making bold requests, that it is hardly likely that this application was the real cause of his disgrace. It was probably rather the consequence of the king's rupture with Mme. de Montespen, to whom Daquin owed his elevation. It appears that ever since the king's marriage he had found some difficulty in maintaining his position, from which it is natural to infer that adverse influences were at work; indeed, it was a protégé, or rather a friend, of Mme. de Maintenon who was promoted to fill his place—a circumstance corroborative of this supposition. Fagon appears to have been a very estimable man, and the attachment and mutual esteem subsisting between him and his patroness, with whom he had first become acquainted in his capacity of physician to the Duc de Maine, never abated. [Footnote 103] He won the confidence also of Louis, and the favor he enjoyed while still in his position of secondary physician was much increased at the period of the king's great illness by a trifling circumstance which made a strong impression on the monarch's mind. One night all the surgeons and doctors, [{687}] Daquin included, had ventured to go to bed. The king had taken a bouillon, and the fever seemed to be subdued. But Fagon, unobserved by the rest, slipped back and took his post in an arm-chair in the ante-room. He was thus at hand to comfort and administer a tisane to the sick monarch, whose fever shortly returned, and who, albeit with the fear of Daquin greatly before his eyes, ventured to accept the services of the attentive subaltern. The tisane sent Louis to sleep, and made Fagon's fortune. Three months afterward he was first in command. He deserved his elevation to an office which was a post of no slight honor and profit. [Footnote 104] He bore his honors meekly, and was remarkable for a spirit of disinterestedness as rare as it was creditable to him. Fagon closes the list of the court physicians of the seventeenth century, and indeed carries us on into the eighteenth. All reserve being made in his favor, it must be confessed that the great dramatist's satire was richly deserved by those doctors of royalty, whose ambitious manoeuvres, intrigues, and paltry rivalries were enough to excite the indignation of any honest man.
[Footnote 103: Fagon was the nephew of Guy de la Brosse, the founder of the Jardin du Roi, now developed into the magnificent Museum of Natural Science and himself also an eminent botanist. He was named professor of botany at this establishment by Valot, who, as first physician to the king, was its superintendent.]
[Footnote 104: The king's physician ranked with the great officers of the crown, and received orders from the sovereign alone, to whom he took an oath of fidelity; and he became a count in virtue of his office, and transmitted his nobility to his children. He was entitled to the same honors and privileges as the high chamberlain. He was a councillor of state, and received the usual emoluments. When he visited the faculty, he was met at the door by the dean, bachelors, and beadles, although he himself might not be a Paris doctor. He had, beside, very extensive authority, enjoying a species of medical jurisdiction throughout the kingdom.]
We have seen that the independent physician, who stood aloof from courting the great, could lead an honorable and tranquil life; but it would be a mistake to conclude that profound peace reigned within the medical corporation itself. On the contrary, it was the scene of a bitter internecine war between the men of the new ideas, the men of progress, and the adherents to tradition and the received system. But to excite men's passions ideas must assume a concrete form, which then becomes at once a rallying-point and a watchword. Such in the seventeenth century were the circulation of the blood and antimony. Ever since the days of Galen the liver had been held to be the origin of the veins, and of those organs by which blood is transmitted to the whole body. Harvey's announcement accordingly raised a universal commotion in the medical world: perhaps his doctrine would have met with less opposition but for the discovery of the lacteal veins by an Italian anatomist, Gasparo Aselli, in the year 1622. These veins, as most of our readers probably know, originating in the intestines, receive and convey thence the products of digestion—the chyle. Imbued with the doctrine of Galen, and deceived by appearances, Aselli, it is true, believed the liver to be their ultimate destination. Immediately there was one general outcry against these intrusive vessels: their non-necessity was put forward as a conclusive objection—a very common argument, it may be noted, with the old doctors. Really it was not worth upsetting received notions on their account—the lacteal vessels were superfluous. Even Harvey, who was among Aselli's opponents, joined in insisting on this unsatisfactory reason. "It is not necessary," he says, "to seek a fresh channel for the transport of the chyle in the lacteal veins." It was evident, he said, that the chyle was carried from the intestines by the mesenteric veins.
But in 1649 Pecquet, a Frenchman, completed the demonstration, by showing that the lacteal veins do not terminate in the liver, but in a reservoir, to which his name was given. Now indeed the liver, and Galen, and the whole edifice of medicine, were threatened; nothing could be deemed sacred any longer. The liver was not the origin of the veins, if the blood careered in a circle, having neither beginning nor end; and the chyle did not go to the liver. [{688}] "Quid de nostra fiet medicina?" was the sorrowful exclamation of one of the doctors of the Montpellier faculty when Pecquet had triumphantly expounded his discovery before them. Ah, there was the difficulty! Quid de nostra fiet medicina? We are condemning our past—an argument which weighs powerfully against all conversions. Nothing can afford stronger evidence of the deep conviction entertained that the whole existing system was at stake, than the opposition of a physician of so much eminence, intellectual and scientific, as Riolan, whom alone of all his adversaries Harvey judged worthy of a rejoinder. It is astonishing, indeed, to see a man of his stamp reduced to throw himself on such arguments as the uselessness and degradation of the liver if the new hypothesis be admitted; to find him urging the impropriety of allowing impure unelaborated chyle to go straight to the heart, which under these circumstances it must do—thus converting that noble seat of vital heat into an ignoble kitchen. And then, once there, how was the chyle to be got rid of? An absurd list of suppositions follows, intended to prove, by an exhaustive process, the sheer impossibility of disposing of the chyle after having arrived at such an impasso. Ergo, the chyle must go to the liver. In fact, it cannot go anywhere else with either reason or propriety. Such are the contemptible arguments to which even superior minds will stoop when they battle against evidence. Harvey, however, found many partisans amongst the Paris faculty. Guy Patin, as we have said, was not of the number: he was not a deep thinker, and trusted his friend Riolan. Harvey's followers were called "circulators." Now "circulator" in Latin means a charlatan—that is enough for Guy Patin. The debate ceased with Riolan's death: the doctrine had been gradually gaining ground. In 1678 its victory had been achieved when Louis instituted at the Jardin des Plantes a special chair of anatomy for propagating the new discoveries.