The surgeons meanwhile had left no stone unturned to get admission into the university, to have a recognized right to lecture publicly, and to receive the chancellor's benediction. They were several times granted the king's license to this effect; but the university disregarded the royal injunction, and even set at naught a Papal bull which, in 1579, recognized the surgeon's title to the chancellor's benediction. There was a consequent appel comme d'abus from that Gallican body to the parliament. Nevertheless, more than one chancellor was found to comply with the Pope's rescript.
Such, then, was the situation of parties in the beginning of Louie XIV.'s reign. Three rival corporations existed; in principle united, but mutually independent. There was the faculty, petrified as it were, in its immobility, demanding from the others a submission it could not obtain; there was the corporation of surgeons, intermediary between the learned bodies and the trading bourgeoisie, wearing the gown on days of ceremony, holding examinations, conferring degrees, but keeping shop; [Footnote 107] and there were the barbers, with neither gown nor school, but living at the expense of the two former classes, and, by long prescription, freely practising surgery, and even medicine to a certain extent. The reasons for old distinctions had passed away—nothing remained but inveterate rivalries. Anatomy was the perpetual theatre for dissension. The surgeons never had resigned themselves to the secondary part allotted to them. They claimed [{693}] to teach what they understood at least as well as their superiors. But how to get bodies? The dean of the faculty had an exclusive claim to those of all executed criminals, and none other were procurable. Accordingly, whenever an execution occurred there was a regular scramble for the poor wretch's body. The students of surgery and the barber-apprentices assembled on the Place de Grève, where they had no difficulty in finding recruits amongst the rabble. Scarcely had the executioner done his work, when these bands, armed with swords and sticks, rushed on the yet warm corpse, which was carried off by the victors to some shop, in which they barricaded themselves against the maréchaussée. Many of these disgraceful acts went unpunished. Sometimes the faculty would despatch an official to claim the body; he was always sent about his business; and then recourse was had to law. The report of an unfortunate huissier, who was actor and victim in one of these scenes, may be seen in a procès-verbal of the time. He was sent to seize a body which had been taken to St. Cosmas's. There he found three professors (in cap and gown!) giving an anatomical demonstration to a large audience. He was received with yells, and cruelly beaten. A force coming to his rescue, the students cut up the corpse into bits rather than let the faculty get it.
[Footnote 107: They hang up at their windows as a sign three emblematic boxes, surmounted with a banner bearing the figures of Sts. Cosmas and Damian.]
A common interest and a common hatred of their domineering antagonist ended by drawing together the two inferior orders, and finally led to their reunion. The increasing number of the barbers, unrestrained by any rule, and unrestrainable by any law, threatened to swamp surgery altogether; and so the men of letters made up their minds to extend the hand of fellowship to the artisans, and receive them back, not as slaves any longer, but as brethren. In 1655 the surgeons swallowed this bitter pill; they took upon themselves the shame of uniting with the barbers, and the barbers entered on the privileges of the surgeons. Parliament ratified the contract, and the faculty was scarcely named in the affair. It was left stranded. Its servants, whom it had raised from the dust to do its work and fight its battles, had betrayed it and gone off with arms and baggage to the enemy's camp. But it was not long without perceiving that it might draw profit from what seemed a discomfiture. The surgeons had conferred their privileges on the barbers; in return they had, of course, accepted the liabilities of their new associates. Now the barbers were bound by contract to an oath of fidelity, and other obligations of a pecuniary nature, to the faculty. This body accordingly claimed either that the union effected should be dissolved, or that both companies should be subject to the engagements by which the barbers had bound themselves. It renewed at the same time all its former claims of supremacy, and its old prohibitions against teaching and conferring degrees, but, above all, against the assumption of the cap and gown.
Three years did this process last, which occupies a voluminous place in the parliamentary registers. The surgeons eventually lost their cause; and that which did not a little contribute thereto was the manifestation of their own miserable internal dissensions. "St. Luke has been stronger than St. Cosmas!" exclaimed the triumphant Guy Patin at the news of this great victory. Seventy-two doctors went in procession, in grand costume, to thank the president, Lamoignon, and the avocat-général, Talon; and in order to testify their special gratitude to the latter, it was decreed that, having well merited of the faculty, he and his family should be attended gratis in perpetuity. A magnificent edition of Hippocrates in five folio volumes was presented along with this decree, inclosed in a silver box. For several days not one of the crest-fallen [{694}] surgeons was to be seen in the streets, and six of their number, it is said, fell sick. Gladly would they now have dissolved the unhappy mésalliance they had contracted, but it was too late. Both barbers and surgeons, indeed, alike felt that the defeat was final; but on the latter it must have fallen with the most crushing severity. Before the close of the year the chair in which Ambroise Paré had sat—the symbol of departed greatness—was removed. They had to pay the impost, take the oath of fidelity—no humiliation was spared them. Thus forced into a preposterous alliance, which was made the pretext for its degradation, the surgical profession languished for many years. The faculty on this occasion certainly committed its worst fault. For paltry questions of precedence it retarded for a century the progress of surgery, which did not emerge from the inferior position to which the decree of 1660 had reduced it until time and necessity led to a reconstitution of surgery and shaving as two distinct professions. It was then that Louis XV., at the instance of La Peyronie, created the Royal Academy of Surgery, which furnished so many illustrious names to science in the eighteenth century, and which would doubtless have extinguished the old faculty if the Revolution had not saved it the trouble by destroying them both.
Our space forbids us to notice the other great battle of the faculty during the period which has immediately fallen under our consideration—that which it waged and won against the Montpellier doctors. But the Montpellier school would deserve a notice by itself; and the interest which gathers round it has been heightened by the important questions, physiological and philosophical, connected with its name in the present day.
A word or two more, and we have done. When Molière was about to deal the faculty its most grievous wound, it was triumphant on all sides. Yet, as a system, it was already doomed to that destruction which had fallen on the whole scholastic method in science prevailing in the middle ages. Hippocrates, it is true, furnished the text-book of medicine, but it was Hippocrates virtually commented by Aristotle, as all the old medical phraseology and medical argumentations abundantly prove. Much of the ridicule attached to that venerable body against which Molière has raised an inextinguishable laugh had its origin in the retention of this language, with all the quiddities of the schools, and of those curious dialectic exercises which formed the approved method of mental gymnastics in the middle ages long after they had been discarded everywhere else. The rest of the ridicule which falls to the due share of the faculty must be laid to the account of the selfishness, pride, and egotism inherent in human nature, but which always strike us more forcibly when exhibited in a state of things foreign to current ideas and manners.
In conclusion, we would point out what we conceive may be esteemed as a sound point in the system of that day—its treatment of man as a whole. There is no divorce with these old doctors between body and soul. Modern medical science has affected to treat the body apart from any regard to the spiritual portion of man's nature. While allowing the immense progress made in medicine and surgery in modern times, we cannot but feel that a serious error was committed in dividing what our fathers deemed inseparable. The materialistic errors of the eighteenth century, and, in particular, the materialism so prevalent in the learned medical body, are a standing comment on the systems which made clear decks of those fundamental principles which had come down to us from the earliest antiquity, and which had received the sanction of the Christian schools, in whose teaching physiology and psychology were always closely united; the study of the soul crowning [{695}] that of physiology. We witness with satisfaction a strong reaction amongst many members of the French medical body toward views which harmonize thoroughly with the old doctrine of the Angel of the School, laid down long before those modern discoveries which are beginning slowly to lead men back, not to the pedantry of the olden time, but to those ancient paths from which our fathers would have deemed it heresy to wander.