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.
7/20
![blood, de Mauvillain was very learned and very liberal, and [346] the conservatives considered him the anti-Christ of medicine. If he did not resemble the physicians in Moliere’s dramas,” says Professor Fnnck-Brentano, ‘‘ it was because he was Moliere’s physician himself; and this is enough ground for believing that de Mauvillian, powdered and perfumed as he was, served and abetted his poet friend in order to ridicule his beloved colleagues of the faculty.” (Funck-BreHtano; Die ^rzte Molieres.) The Parisian college was against all modernism. Like the Chinese, the doctors had built a wall of stone and adamant against the ingress of advanced thought. As Dr. M. J. Conk- lin remarks, the spirit of the times is happily shown in the following extract from the statutes of the Academy at Helmsta.dt; We desire the medical art, even as it was rightly and wholly fixed and handed down, under the guidance of God, by the artists Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna, to be preserved and diffused by teaching. We recommend that all Empirics and the ‘ Tet- ralogies ’ of Paracelsus, with other corruptions of medicine not agreeable to the doctrines of Galen and Avicenne, be banished entirely from the academy. This‘doctrine was a stumbling block to the progress of all science. In the reigns of Francis II, Charles IX, Henry III, and Henry IV, the faculty was bitterly embroiled with Ambroise Pare. As Mr. Stephen Paget says “ it was a sort of Holy War for the deliverance of surgery from the bondage of medicine.” In the year 1575 (April 22), Pare published his book, a folio of 945 pages, on surgery. It was written in French, so that even a plain mortal (one not begowned or becapped) could imderstand every word of it. The Faculty became alarmed. On July 9 of the same year, they met and besides observing that Pare was only a barber surgeon, thrust amongst them by the king, ignorant of Latin and Greek, they charged him with gross indecency and immorality. Five days later. Parliament called the case for hearing, and carrying the farce to the end, decided that Pare had no legal right to publish a work on medicine without first receiving permission from the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2804051x_0009.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
