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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![[344] All the sciences were at first feared and opposed. So was medicine. What we do not understand, we fear or ridicule. The physician as the expounder of the mysterious science of medicine has, in all ages, caused fear in the timid and has been the butt of criticism from the skeptics. Only a few who have understood have given the physician and his art their just honor and respect. Moliere was not of these. He understood, I firmly believe, the true value of medicine, but he was disgusted with the practice of it in the seventeenth century. When science is degraded to quacker}’-, and when the physician pursues the methods of the charlatan, there is certain to arise a violent opposition to such fiagrant ignorance and dishonesty. The dramas Monsieur de Pourceaugnac,” The Plying Physi- cian,^^ “ The Doctor in Spite of Himself,’’ and “ The Doctor in Love” were the direct outcome of a healthy dissatisfaction with a profession whose only claim to efidcacy was that it had not changed since the days of Hippocrates and Galen, and which took more pride in black gowns and Latin gibberish than in diagnosis and prognosis. When it is said that Moliere was feared by churchmen and physicians one has said enough against the reputation of the physicians of those days. A man who was so logical as to be against the clerg}'- of the seven- teenth century must have had enough cause for opposing the medical faculty of the time. Jean Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris in the month of January, 1622, six years after the death of the world’s great- est dramatist in Stratford-upon-Avon. His father was an industrious and thrifty upholsterer. That the Poquelin fam- ily was well-to-do is to be seen from the inventory given in the will of Jean Baptiste’s mother. She bequeathed silver- ware and goldware and certain diamonds to the members of her family, and left each of her children an inheritance of five thousand livres. The story extant that the future dram- atist suffered from the tight-fistedness of his father is improba- ble. Doubtless his father with the usual bourgeois respect for gold, was dissatisfied with the tastes of his son. Nevertheless, he paid his son’s debts arid saw to it that the boy received an education above that of the average lad of the period. When yet a boy, Jean Baptiste found his father’s trade](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2804051x_0004.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
