A letter of Gui Patin's, moreover, demonstrates the evidence in pointthat in his time practitioners dared to blame cures made where the precepts of the grand masters in medicine were not literally followed:

When Moliere, in his satirical pieces, | ample. One day, in a similar case, in held that patients must die method- the year 1633, I pleaded the twentyically, when he makes Bahis, in "Love second aphorism of the first book: the Physician," say that "it is better to Concocta medicari oportet, non cruda,' die according to rules," rather than etc.; and he responded in a few words: escape death against rules, we can see 'It is a beautiful aphorism, but it is not how the conceit pleases. necessary to abuse it.' Our diseases have only made scholastic disputes. Fauvel, in truth, has been contradicted by a too Galenical Italian, a vain, envious man named Alexander Massaria, in the second volume of his work, and by Saxonia; although, to speak truly, these two professors of Padua have apparently seen less of disease, no more, than Sennert, who has discussed this question in his second volume on fevers, Chapter VI. This is why, if this quarrel lasts much longer between you, base yourself on the authority of Fauvel, who is the Prince of all modern physicians, and you will be supported in the future by the authority on your side; that which will impose silence on your adversary if he be wise."

"Your M. de la Guilleminiere," writes he to Doctor Falconnet, of Lyons, "is wrong in accusing you of having purged your patient on the fourth day, seeing that your treatment succeeded and that the patient recovered. He has no business to know the motive that led you to resort to such treatment, and is wrong in saying that purging on the fourth day is contrary to the doctrines laid down by Hippocrates and Galen; Turgente materia quotidie licet purgare.' You have done nothing save by the rule of indications, which have led you so well and happily that the patient recovered. That which you have given to purge him was sedative, and the ancients did the same at the commencement of a disease. A medicament composed of two drachms of senna, cassia and tamarand cannot be called other than a minoratif. You can assign still another reason, to-wit, that in diseases where we fear an internal inflammation it is better to purge than to permit the humors to rotten in the first region, lest that this serous and malignant humor may be carried to the brain or lung. Baillou, in such a case, would agree with you; but Fauvel, who is another good man, would even more than agree. It is in the third book of his No doubt this satire only applies in "General Method," Chapter XII, that a general manner to the pedantic form I am ashamed of the innocence of this which received, at that period, college man, who wishes to grow in favor at studies-the humanities, properly speakLyons, and is ignorant enough to think ing. No doubt he erred in seeing, in that one dare not purge before the the rôle of Diaforius the younger, the seventh day. For twenty-six years I picture of an oddity common among have tried it more than a hundred times, the majority of young doctors, leaving with good success always. Doctor the benches of philosophy and as yet Nicholas Pietre was my master and a free from professional influence. When good preceptor-to tell the truth, an we reflect, too, that the study of mediincomparable man; he set me the ex-cine has had in all times a grave and

This passage, that we have cited at length by reason of the interest it offers in a medical sense, demonstrates how great, at this epoch, the mania was to reinforce by the best arguments and reasoning the citations of authors held as authorities. The simplest case brought on the most pretentious speculations; there was a ridiculous aspect in this that could not escape the keen eye of Moliere. We know the exclamations that, in the piece" Maladie Imaginaire," the flowery rhetoric, much too brilliant, of Thomas Diaforius, drawn out by the malicious Toinette: Long live the medical colleges from whence such talented men graduate! There's what it is to study; we learn to say beautiful things!"

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serious side, it becomes difficult to understand the character of Thomas Diaforius. We are tempted to believe that Moliere, forgetting himself for once, has been guilty of bad taste, and has created an exception in place of taking his subject for ridicule from a common class.

Boileau has remarked of the knaveries of Scapin: "In the ridiculous sackcloth in which Scapin is enveloped, I recognize no more than the author of the 'Misanthrope.""

to satisfy thy thirst, but even without having the liberty of tasting. I have made only a few rivulets flow from thee at present, of which, if the sight please thee, I shall open out the floodgates to render free not only for the use of a Riviere (river), but of an entire ocean." Deboze's style is that of 1680, and we find that if genius has always existed the taste was not refined.

When Diaforius enthusiastically rejoices in his son because the latter But here criticism" blindly clings to the opinions of the ancients and never wishes to understand nor listen to the reasoning and experiments of the pretended discoveries of the age, regarding the circulation of the blood," etc.-this is the scientific passion of the day that the satirist ridicules.

falls flat. The following citations prove that in the time of Moliere the physicians made themselves liable to ridicule by their bombastic rhetoric.

Meissonnier dedicated his "Course of Medicine" to Madam the Marquise of Caluse, and uses the following burlesque language: "I leave to savants the mission of commenting on your birth. I shall only dwell on that to which I have consecrated for you in particular, in a time even when the light of day had not lightened the world for you; when you only lived, in fact, sustained life with the blood of Madam your mother, within herself," etc., etc. Three pages of such nonsense.

In the days of Moliere the discoveries of Harvey regarding the circulation of blood met with the most bitter and inexplicable opposition from the School of Paris. The obstinacy in holding ancient doctrines was pushed to such a degree that Riolan and his sect did not hesitate to make the following impious declaration: "Malo cum Galeno errare, quam cum Harveyo esse circulator!"

Moliere's stage character Diaforius gives the reason he does not wish his son to attend the Court in the capacity of physician: "To you, my boy," says he, "speaking frankly, our profession near the great has never appeared agreeable, and I have always found it best to live among the common people. The public is indulgent; you need respond for your acts to no one, and pro

profession, one is not troubled by what may happen to the patient. But what is unfortunate is that the rich and great, when they become ill, insist on their doctors curing them."

M. F. Deboze, translating the "Centuries of Riviere," played upon the name of its author, and addresses his readers in the following foolish style: "The author of this work is the celebrated Riviere (English Rivers), otherwise Dean of the Faculty of Montpellier, whose works have found so many admirers among doctors that they have already passed through thirty-two edi-viding you follow the rules of your tions. This is a Riviere (river) so pure and beautiful that no one can confine its course in this too narrow realm, so that it flows among strange lands across the Alps-the Pyrenees, over the Rhine and Danube; the Italians, Spanish, Dutch and Germans love so much the taste of this learned water that they glory in striving to make it their own, and transmit it to all the nations of the earth. It appears to me unjust that strangers should slacken their thirst at long distances from the source that belongs to thee, so naturally that, like a Tantulas, thou art found in the midst of its waters, without power not only

This was the time of the misfortunes of Valot, Physician to the Court, charged with the health-keeping of Mazarin, whose daily whims had to be humored. Proofs of this state in medical affairs at that period abound in "Gui Patin's Letters," who writes under date of August 31, 1660: "The King and Queen have arrived at Vincennes. Cardinal Mazarin is sick there with nephritic colic; he has already

black color, infects the animal spirits | in this scene more than it seems to and makes them mournful; for instance, believe. in hypochondriac melancholy, according to Galen, there is inflammation in the hypochondria, conseqnently a hot intemperance prevails and dominates; this inflammation, or rather phlogosis of the hypochondria; this is caused by the melancholic blood, retained too long in the spleen, where it acquires a heat by obstruction, whence vapors arise to the brain. We know that this malady arises from the body by the melancholic or natural habits of the body, which is black, hairy, thin, with other signs; we know that this disease arises from the hypochondria by an excess of heat in the entrails, frequent spitting, and winds by the mouth.”

It is necessary to be a physician, doubtless, in order to understand all the genius of observation and study in certain satires of Moliere against the physicians of his time. It is also a physician who must appreciate at their just value the serious judgments that Moliere gives in his medical dramas. Let the public laugh at his comedies! To physicians belong the right to admire them, but also the authority to contradict in some of these unjust sarcasms his false conceptions and unmerited aggressive

ness.

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In the scene between Lucas and Martine in The Physician in Spite of Himself," Martine, who wishes to avenge himself, prepares to castigate with rods, describing himself as the most marvelous man in the world for desperate cures. "Now," says he, "this is a man who performs miracles. It is but three weeks since a youngster of twelve years fell from a clock tower and broke his head upon the pavement, likewise his arms and legs. They brought in my man, who rubbed the child's body all over with a certain ointment that he knew how to make, and the child immediately rose to its feet and ran off to play hide and seek." Presently Lucas, Valere, Perrin and Thibault ran after this learned man, this famous doctor!

A fact, already old to-day, and to which we might add others, proves to us that the public is satirized

In 1848, the middle of the nineteenth century, an impudent rascal, who had learned in prison to apply empirical remedies haphazard, settled down to practice in a village of our country. Cooper by trade, wholly uneducated, but a worthy drunkard, this man announced his ability to perform marvelous cures, and proclaimed all doctors ignorant. He should have succeeded, for, like Moliere's character Sganarelle, he loved to laugh, he was a fool. A child in the village was confined to bed by caries of the hip-joint. The quack said he would put the patient on his feet in eight days, and made crutches. The time having expired, he assured the parents that the child was cured. The good parents, believing in the imposter, obliged the poor little fellow to walk the streets of the village, and the noise of the miracle was heard for a long distance. Soon all the afflicted of the adjacent country, rich and poor, flocked to the village. To some he gave bottles of "Christian fat," for five, ten, twenty, up to fifty francs; to others he gave an ointment of a healing kind, which scorched their skins as well as their purses. As for the poor, he played the part of good Prince, and was content to take for pay a glass of brandy or a bottle of wine. For three whole months this scandal was continued in different Communes, up to the time he was obliged to fly from the indignation of those he had had previously enthused.

The scene of Orvietan, who, in "L'Amour Médecin," terminates in a medical satire, is it not addressed to the public as well as to doctors? The good man Sganarelle, father of Lucinda, is it not the father of the family always provided" with remedies by which many have been cured?" Is this not the history of the dear public, which to-day, as in the time of Moliere, pass so quickly and easily from the hands of educated physicians into those of the latest charlatan, be he faith healer, bone setter, magnetic quack, or urinary chemist? The dear public, now as then, cries to the medical pretender: