Moliere and the physician / by Max Kahn.

  • Kahn, Max.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

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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    [346] facult5^ The defence of the eminent surgeon was quite a shaft of sarcasm against ignorant intolerance; For more than thirty years I have been printing my treatises on surgery .... which made me think, if I gathered them to- gether, I should be doing a thing very agreeable to the public. Having accomplished it, and that at an expense past thinking— lo and behold—the physicians and the surgeons have set them- selves to obscure and suppress them, for this sole reason, that I wrote in our mother tongue, in phrases quite easy to be under- stood. The physicians feared lest all who should get the book into their hands would be advised how to take care of themselves in time of sickness, and would not be at the pains to call them in. The surgeons were afraid lest the barbers, reading these, my works, would receive full instruction in all the operations of surgery, and would come to be as good as themselves and thus trespass on their domains. When Pare planned to publish his second edition, he con- sulted the faculty, and in order to please them, he removed his obnoxious articles on fevers (which only physicians could write about) and included his observations on that subject in his discussion of tumors. This modesty and meekness pleased the “ congregated college,” and they did not oppose the publication of this work. (S. Paget: Ambroise Pare and His Times.) The faculty in the time of Louis XIV was the same in aspirations and ideas as the faculty in the times of the last Valois. Surgery was opposed because no dignified physician would hold a knife in his hand, and to elevate the barber to the dignity of a doctor was not to be thought of. Circulation of the blood was proscribed because it was English. If the blood did circulate it was against the laws of the faculty. It had no business to flow contrary to the beliefs of Hippocrates and Galen. Besides,” said they, “ if the blood circulates, it is useless to bleed, because the loss sustained by an organ will be immediately repaired, hence bleeding is useless, therefore the blood does not circulate.” The prescribing of antimony was prohibited by the faculty at Paris, for the simple reason that the faculty of Montpel- lier highly recommended it. de Mauvillain espoused the cause of antimony and circulation of the blood and was, therefore, ostracized from the association of physicians.