Licence: In copyright
Credit: Moliere and the physician / by Max Kahn. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![[348] They will never listen to anybody. I see it was the truth I was told and that this Master Aristotle was a talker, and nothing else.” The doctor has a very good opinion of himself. Get along, you are more impertinent than the fellow who main- tained that we ought to say the form of a hat instead of a figure, and I will prove it to you at this time, by the help of demon- strative and convincing reasons, and by arguments in Barbara, that you are and never will be anything but a simpleton and that I am and ever shall be, in uiroque jure, the Doctor Pancrace. . . . A man of sufficiency, a man of capacity, a man finished in all the sciences, natural, moral, and political. A savant, savantissime, per omnes modos et casv^. A man who has a knowledge suptrla- tive of fables, mythologies, and histories; grammar, poetry, rheto- ric, dialectics, and sophistry; mathematics, arithmetic, optics, ornicritics, physics and metaphysics; cosmometry, geometry, architecture, speculary, and speculatory sciences, medicine, as- tronomy, astrology, physiognomy, meteposcopy, chromancy, geo- mancy. The doctor gets out of breath naming all these true and pseudo branches of learning. He is very intolerant of a diverse opinion, and would condemn anyone to the galleys or scaffold for contradicting him. Moliere ever attacks vice, undauntedly, uncompromisingly. He seems to fear to be too lenient with corruptions, lest he himself become indifferent. Pope well puts it; Vice is a monster of such frightful mien. That to be hated needs but to be seen. Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face We first endure, then pity, then embrace. —Essay on Man. Hot all the doctors of Moliere are so indifferent in money matters as is the savant Pancrace of Le Mairiage Force. In fact, the humorist rarely imagined a physician who was not absorbed in money making. He is not harsh with weak- lings and sinners. He langhs at them heartily, and he expects us not to condemn his Sganarelles and Gros-Eenes and Mas- carilles. It is true that they are deep-dyed rogues but he smiles at their escapades and is very lenient with their delin- quencies. Hot so with the physicians and savants. There always seems to be something rankling in his heart against](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2804051x_0014.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
