Twentieth Century History of Findlay and Hancock County, Ohio, and Representative Citizens, Part 152

Author: Jacob Anthony Kimmell
Publication date: 1910
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 1189

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erroës (1126-1148), like Aristotle, philosopher rather physician, translated the writings of the latter into Arabic which tongue they were rendered into Latin, first, it is 1, in 1472. His writings are of interest to the physician at they have supplied numerous commentaries to those ristotle, treating on medical subjects, and in opposing of Galen's views. The writings of the authors mentioned those most extensively employed as texts in medicine in ime of Dante; from them the profesors in medicine read leir classes, explaining, translating and making com- iums from and comments to them.

laddaeus, of Florence (1215-1295 (1303) ) was a contem- y of Dante. He held a professorship in medicine in Bol- Through his efforts the practical introduction of Arabic : ces into the medical schools of Italy was largely due. He o generally accredited as being the first known medieval r who assayed in good faith and with excellent judgment, nite the philosophy of the age with rational medicine. 1 his professional career resulted the translation of Aris- commended by Dante in the Convito, and his com- s on the Aphorisms and Prognostications of Hippocrates Galen. He is mentioned by the early commentators of e as having been the most skilled physician of his nd in originality equal to Hippocrates. Dante's choice of as a representative of those engaged in pursuit of worldly 's may rest upon the quoted fact that Thaddaeus was ius for his exorbitant fees and his covetousness. We are ;hat in 1285 he asked three thousand Bolognese lires and cort to and from the place for his services in attending alian nobleman.

might add to this list of physicians the names of some while not referred to by Dante as such, yet deserve recog- L from the medical student. From among the ancients to Dante gives a place in the Divine Comedy we may select, s of Miletus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles (to whom we owe rms amnion and chorion), Heraclitus, Democritus, Epi- and Zeno. These philosophers were metaphysicians and ists (natural philosophers) as well, and in those capa- xercised a very essential influence upon Greek medicine. hilosophers of the Middle Ages, who busied themselves ntally with medicine, that being a branch of medieval ophy, are represented by Albertus Magnus, Thomas as, Hugo de St. Victaire and Peter of Spain. The ns of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas exercised ; profound influence upon the medicine and the natural 's generally during the entire Middle Ages following the in which they lived.

sidered by themselves, the medical references in the Comedy give no reliable index from which to form an a of Dante's medical knowledge. True some few give

without doubt he gleaned also from observation, yet we can ill afford to claim these as the product of a mind especially trained in medicine. For the most part the references are popular and general and at best tend to give but a partial reflection of the medicine current in Dante's time. As we read it in the Divine Comedy it is the medicine of Hippocrates and Galen, with a touch of the Arabic, and interwoven with theology and mysti- cism. Whether what it expresses was Dante's belief we can not decide. Dante may have believed with some of the ablest minds of his day in the virtue of gems and amulets, in magic and in the healing powers of the saints and the evil workings of the devil, or he may have shared these beliefs as little as we do today. His age professed such beliefs and he may have availed himself of its creed in medicine, as in other things, the better to induce appreciation of his poem, for he intended it to be read by all men and therefore wrote it in the " vulgar " tongue. The medicine in Homer, Shakespeare or Goethe has not proved these authors to have been physicians, neither can that of the Divine Comedy or for that matter, that in any of Dante's writings make out Dante a physician. The truth is, that it was only as a poet that Dante was great and original, and whether physician or not, he did not intend to convey his knowledge of medicine to us, but drew upon it merely as he did upon all those branches of science and art with which his genius and wide range of learning had acquainted him to con- tribute their share in the making of the pillars of that endur- ing superstructure the Divine Comedy, the ineffaceable mirror of the Dantean Age.

REFERENCES.

It would require a very large volume to contain nothing more than the names of almost innumerable particular and special students of and treatises that have been published on the Divine Comedy. I doubt not that more than one dissertation on the medicine in the Divine Comedy may be found amongst the litera- ture of different nations, if it were sought for amongst the hun- dreds of books and thousands of pamphlets. I have made no effort to find one. I have availed myself of and borrowed freely from many books, deemed reliable sources treating on the life of Dante, on the history of medicine and the history of that age. A few of those I have found most helpful are here added.

I. BIOGRAPHY.

Kraus, Franz Xaver: Dante, Sein Leben und sein Werk, sein Verhältniss zur Kunst und Politik. Berlin, 1897.

Scartazzini, G. A .: Dantehandbuch. Leipzig, 1892.

-. Dante Alighieri, Zeit, Leben und Werke: Leipzig, 1869. Witte, Carl: Danteforschungen. Bd. I, Halle, 1869; Bd. II, Heilbronn, 1879.

Lowell, James Russell: Dante: cf. Among my Books, Second Series, 1876 .*

* To all American readers, who would seek a more intimate acquaintance with Dante, I recommend Lowell's exhaustive essay.

II. HISTORIES OF MEDICINE.

Häser, H .: Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medizin. 1875-1882. Wernich und Puschmann: Biographisches Lexikon der hervor- ragenden Aerzte aller Zeiten und Völker. 1884-1888.

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Kotelmann, L .: Gesundheitspflege im Mittelalter. 1890. Handerson, H. E .: The School of Salernum. 1883. Hecker, J. Fr. K .: Geschichte der Heilkunde. 1822-1829. -. Die Tanzwuth, eine Volkskrankheit im Mittelalter. 1832. Baas and Handerson (Trans.): Outlines of the History of Medicine and the Medical Profession. 1889.

Magnus, H., and Salinger (Trans.) : Superstition in Medicine. 1908.

III. GENERAL.

Staley, E .: The Guilds of Florence. 1906. Hallam, H .: State of Europe during the Middle Ages S. Lees, B. A .: Central Period of the Middle Ages. 1909. Lodge, R .: The Close of the Middle Ages, 1909. Emerton, E .: Mediaeval Europe. 1894. Taylor, H. O .: Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages 1. Allbutt, T. C .: Science and Mediaeval Thought. 1900.

MOLIÈRE AND THE PHYSICIAN.

By MAX KAHN, M. A., M. D., New York.

Boileau, the brilliant and outspoken critic of the French Elizabethan Era, in a conversation with Louis XIV, informed the Grand Monarque that he considered Molière the greatest of French writers, whereat Louis the Great sneered. It was this same critic, who, on being asked his opinion of some stanzas written by the King, cleverly replied: "Sire, in all things are you successful. You had desired to write the worst poem in the world, and you have admirably fulfilled your wish." We know not what the scion of the Bourbons retorted, nor how he felt. That he took it coolly is really praiseworthy. It is no wonder that the French king, although he always felt a kindness for the great humorist, disagreed with Boileau. The son of an upholsterer, the man who so inimitably strutted on the stage personifying ludicrous per- sonages, could not, in the opinion of Louis XIV, be the great- est littérateur in France.

Not only this monarch, but many wise men in later times, took issue with Boileau. Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld have all been given precedence over the man who has made the whole world laugh for several centuries. During life Molière suffered intensely from lack of apprecia- tion by the populace and the nobility. Every courtier behaved superciliously toward the cleverest man in the court. He was very poor. Twice he was imprisoned because of lack of funds for the payment of certain debts that were incurred in his attempts to organize a theatre. The clergy were openly against him. The faculty of medicine was silent, because of impotency. At death he was refused consecrated burial, and only a man- date from Louis XIV secured for him religious rites at his funeral. He was interred on a rainy day. The beadle or sexton forgot to mark the grave wherein Molière was laid, so that even the last resting place of the greatest of French dramatists is not known.

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.

Molière 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 kery, and when the physician pursues the

methods of the charlatan, there is certain to arise at opposition to such flagrant ignorance and dishonesty .. dramas " Monsieur de Pourceaugnac," "The Flying ? cian," "The Doctor in Spite of Himself," and ""The To: Love " were the direct outcome of a healthy dissetis. with a profession whose only claim to efficacy was that : not changed since the days of Hippocrates and Gak: which took more pride in black gowns and Latin give- than in diagnosis and prognosis. When it is said that !' was feared by churchmen and physicians one has said . . against the reputation of the physicians of those days. A. who was so logical as to be against the clergy of the x . teenth century must have had enough cause for oppans medical faculty of the time.

Jean Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris in the moc: January, 1622, six years after the death of the world's est dramatist in Stratford-upon-Avon. His father was industrious and thrifty upholsterer. That the Poqueli: : ily was well-to-do is to be seen from the inventory gire. the will of Jean Baptiste's mother. She bequeathed : ware and goldware and certain diamonds to the meme !. her family, and left each of her children an inheritat- five thousand livres. The story extant that the future 2: atist suffered from the tight-fistedness of his father is im;". ble. Doubtless his father with the usual bourgeois respec. gold, was dissatisfied with the tastes of his son. Neverthe he paid his son's debts and saw to it that the boy re. . an education above that of the average lad of the peria!

When yet a boy, Jean Baptiste found his father's distasteful. The attraction of the streets, where gar .= were to be seen, was more to him than the disgusting mot." of the upholsterer's shop, where success depended upon x." liness, punctuality and lacquey-like fawning upon nokk : tomers. Molière was never punctual nor strictly order!s. certainly he never could toady, and lacking these qua." there was naught in his ancestor's business to please him. I smell of glue in his father's shop could not satisfy the ; who loved the odors of sweet smelling flowers and the te." of the fields and the sunshine and the forests.

The streets of Paris, though very narrow and very in those days, were quite gay. Swashbuckling mult haughtily strutted about and were very happy in pre- duels. They fought for insults to the king or their reg or to prove the superiority of certain sweethearts, or for

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. drama, fought a dozen times and killed ten adversaries der to defend the honor of his own elephantine proboscis. ttes, wenches and quacks traversed all the thoroughfares, accosted all passers-by who seemed capable of spending sous. In certain main streets, it was especially inter- g. In the rue de Pont Neuf, the comedians of the day to perform for the benefit of the public. Here young Jean iste was Bellerose and Mondory and Gros Guillaume, amous artists of that time, who set the audiences roaring eir coarse jests and phantastic contortions. Here, also, aw Guillot Gorju, the actor quack, who ridiculed les ecins, and whose sharp witticisms Molière incorporated · into his dramas.

t the age of fourteen Molière was sent to the Jesuit College lermont near Paris, where he associated with sons of the lity. Here he undoubtedly saw Prince Armand de Conti later became his patron. There is no evidence, however, this prince ever so much as talked to the low born Poquelin. e else is known of Molière's student life. He studied for : time under Gassendi. He especially admired Lucretius Terence among the ancients and Rabelais among the erns. He left the above named institution, after a course tudy of several years, for the law school at Orleans, ere," as his enemy Le Boulanger de Chalussay has it, ' donkey could buy a diploma." However, he went to aw courts only once.

tradition would have it that Molière studied for the thood, but this is wholly a fable, for the bright-witted, willed Molière could never brook a monkish life with its ctions and monotony. Still, if he ever did intend to ice law or study theology, the purpose must have been

desultory than serious, for we find him in the month nuary, 1643, fully embarked on the venturesome career median and stage manager. (Chatfield-Taylor: Life olière.)

avelling, actor-like, he fell in with the Béjart family, a ing band of performers, and- soon ingratiated himself vor of Madeline Béjart whom he married. Aided by weetheart and the whole company, he opened "The rious Theatre." This venture was a failure, and after imprisoned twice for debt, Molière had to flee Paris to another incarceration in the debtor's jail. Together his company he strolled over France and appeared in aux, Toulouse, Lyons, Orleans, Limoges, Narbonne and as at different periods, everywhere receiving permis- o erect a stage to perform comedies.

cessively under the patronage of Duke D'Epernon and e de Conti, the fortunes of the poet began to flourish. e provinces and in the capitol, Molière kept his eyes and he himself began to ridicule the foibles and vanities average Parisian bourgeois. Soon dramatic works fol- one another, and his fame reached the ears of the king, 'rom this time forward was quite a generous patron. g this period he wrote his greatest dramas, and, receiv- 'otection from the king, he attacked the medical profes-

he had anticipated, the doctors refused to attend him in his last illness. He died on the seventeenth of February, 1673. " This same day, about ten o'clock at night, after the comedy, Monsieur de Molière died in his house, rue de Richelieu. He had played the part of the said malade (Le Malade Imaginaire) suffering from cold and inflammation which caused a violent cough. In the violence of the cough he burst a vessel in his body, and did not live more than half an hour or three-quarters after the bursting of the vessel." (La Grange: Register.)

To fully comprehend the causes that led Molière to wage a bitter warfare against medicine and the doctors, we must briefly review the medical history of the seventeenth century. Periods in which transpire changes from the accepted state of events and things are ever characterized by violence, satire and much bitterness. The seventeenth century is the transi- tion era from medieval irrationality and empiricism in medi- cine to modern scientific experimentation and rationality. In times of revolution, there are ultra-conservatives and ultra- radicals. The medical iconoclasts of the reign of Louis XIV were opposed by the unreasoning obstinacy of the Parisian medical faculty, who thought it a crime to venture out of the rut of prescribed practice. " Who shall judge when doctors disagree," is an old apothegm. The layman becomes puzzled and consults the quack, and the more strife and contention there is between the various schools of medicine, the more will quackery and dishonesty thrive. Between the violent radical and the obdurate conservative, the enlightened cool headed physician is lost sight of.

The practice of medicine in the seventeenth century was mere empiricism. The faculty was inculcated with the dignity of its profession, and laid much stress on the ceremonials of practice. The oath that a professor of medicine took when nominated is quite characteristic: " I here pronounce faith- fully to teach in a long gown with wide sleeves, a doctoral cap on my head, a knot of scarlet ribbon on my shoulder." Nevertheless an epoch which could produce such men as Harvey, Sydenham, Malpighi, Willis and many other famous doctors whose names are almost household words, cannot be looked upon as a period of grotesque hypocrisy and profound ignorance. There must be another side to the matter, and the legend of the satirist must not be wholly taken for granted :

Longue peruque, habit grotesque, Affecter un air pédantesque, Cracher du grec et du latin, Tout cela réuni fait presque, Ce qu'on appelle un médecin.

Molière has tremendously exaggerated in the humorous episodes and the comic situations the true condition of his time. Disgusted as he was with science that was unable to cure his disease, (because no science could cure it), he sought aid amongst the quacks of the Pont Neuf; he consulted the town criers and the wandering mountebanks. If we examine the lives and works of leading physicians of Paris of the seven- teenth century, we must inevitably come to the conclusion that

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Molière's doctors, the Tomes, Desfonandres, Macrotons, Bahis are mere burlesques. That they have survived such a long period is due to the fact that they are comical even if not true, and that in their conversation and behavior grains of realism may be discovered.

Molière was very well acquainted with the physicians of the court. Fagon was at that time the chief physician in attendance on the king, a position of great dignity and importance. Fagon occupied the chair of Botany in the Jardin Royal, and it was his endeavors and studies that added importance to the science of botany. He corresponded with the learned men of the whole world, and received from them rare botanical specimens which he stored in the Jardin Royal, making that institution the most famous museum in Europe. In the year 1665 he made the first catalog of this collection under the title of Hortus Regius. He was a most honest man. " His disinterestedness," says M. Fauvelle, " was as wonder- ful as his learning. He abolished the buying of offices in the learned colleges, and refused large sums of money that were offered him. His modesty was very great, and he always sought to avoid the honors that the faculty desired to confer on him. Compulsion was exerted to persuade him to accept his nomination to the Academie des Sciences."

Dr. Fagon's co-worker was Armand de Mauvillain, the friend of Molière. de Mauvillain was a physician of the Mont- pellier school, and, therefore, an enemy of the Parisian faculty. It has been surmised that this doctor gave a helping hand to Molière in writing the satires on Medicine. Receiving the degree in medicine from the University of Paris in 1648, he settled in the capital and had quite a lucrative practice. With the advance of the teachings of Harvey and Malpighi, he became an adherent of the theory of the circulation of the blood. de Mauvillain was very learned and very liberal, and the conservatives considered him the anti-Christ of medicine. " If he did not resemble the physicians in Molière's dramas," says Professor Funck-Brentano, "it was because he was Molière'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-Brentano: Die Ærzte Molières.)

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 Helmstadt :

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 H ..... TV, the faculty was bitterly embroiled with Ambroise

Paré. As Mr. Stephen Paget says "it was a sort of E War for the deliverance of surgery from the bendig medicine."

In the year 1575 (April 22), Pare published his twee folio of 945 pages, on surgery. It was written in Frem that even a plain mortal (one not begowned or bear- could understand every word of it. The Faculty bes alarmed. On July 9 of the same year, they met and ix - observing that Paré was only a barber surgeon, thrust an : them by the king, ignorant of Latin and Greek, they da: him with gross indecency and immorality. Fire dage . Parliament called the case for hearing, and carrying the ' to the end, decided that Paré had no legal right to puti- work on medicine without first receiving permission frez faculty. The defence of the eminent surgeon was q=" shaft of sarcasm against ignorant intolerance:

For more than thirty years I have been printing my trasz on surgery .... which made me think, if I gathered then gether, I should be doing a thing very agreeable to the pa Having accomplished it, and that at an expense past thinkx- lo and behold-the physicians and the surgeons have set 12 selves to obscure and suppress them, for this sole reason. x wrote in our mother tongue, in phrases quite easy to be th! stood. The physicians feared lest all who should get the into their hands would be advised how to take care of theme" in time of sickness, and would not be at the pains to call thre. The surgeons were afraid lest the barbers, reading these. : works, would receive full instruction in all the operatic. . surgery, and would come to be as good as themselves and :: trespass on their domains.

When Paré planned to publish his second edition, be .: sulted the faculty, and in order to please them, he rit his obnoxious articles on fevers (which only physicians e. write about) and included his observations on that s; in his discussion of tumors. This modesty and men- pleased the " congregated college," and they did not eer- the publication of this work. (S. Paget: Ambroise Pare c His Times.)

The faculty in the time of Louis XIV was the su=> aspirations and ideas as the faculty in the times of the Valois. Surgery was opposed because no dignified phys. would hold a knife in his hand, and to elevate the berk: the dignity of a doctor was not to be thought of. Cine. of the blood was proscribed because it was English. L': blood did circulate it was against the laws of the faculty. had no business to flow contrary to the beliefs of Hippec. and Galen. " Besides," said they, "if the blood circulate. is useless to bleed, because the loss sustained by an organ v. be immediately repaired, hence bleeding is useless, that." the blood does not circulate."

The prescribing of antimony was prohibited by the fe at Paris, for the simple reason that the faculty of Mix; lier highly recommended it. de Mauvillain espoused the . of antimony and circulation of the blood and was, ther : ostracized from the association of physicians.

As strict partisans of the principles of the Parisian fx: Jean Riolan (1577-1657) and Guy Patin (1601-1612), preeminent. Patin, "polemical medical man and & j humorist of that day," said of Riolan that he would Google

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her systems, might rather be called a systemic phantasy." system is based upon the elements of chemistry-the ved successor of alchemy and the first step toward true try -; upon the new knowledge of the circulation of od; and upon the closer acquaintance with the chyle mph vessels (which had been acquired in this period), I as upon the old doctrine of the "spiritus and the nnatus " of the heart. His system, although its author professes to accept only "experience by means of the is constructed far less upon experience than upon onclusions drawn from experimental observations, whose tion with his theory is on the whole arbitrary and " (J. H. Baas: Geschichte der Medicin.)

osed to their beliefs were the theories of the Iatro- natical school whose motto was, "In your practice, not yourselves with theories." The originator of this was Santorio Santoro (1561-1636), Professor in Padua nice. Their idea was to treat all things with precision, at all functions in the body were physical rather than al. " Thus digestion was referred to as a process of tical trituration, and the absorption of chyle was ex- as due to the pressure arising from the action of the al movements upon the comminuted food. In a similar e secretions were referred to as the resistance created corners, curves, angles, etc., of the vascular system, on."

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Twentieth Century History of Findlay and Hancock County, Ohio, and Representative Citizens, Part 152

Author: Jacob Anthony Kimmell Publication date: 1910 Publisher: Number of Pages: 1189

Author: Jacob Anthony Kimmell
Publication date: 1910
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 1189