The Sun King by Nancy Mitford

Author:Nancy Mitford [Mitford, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Royalty
ISBN: 9781590175064
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2012-05-08T06:54:29+00:00

12. THE FACULTY

Presque tous les hommes meurent de leurs remèdes et non de leurs maladies.

MOLIÈRE

Illness and death were very dreadful at Versailles. As soon as the breath had left the body of a member of the royal family, his or her gilded bed-chamber was turned into a butcher’s shop. Lords or ladies-in-waiting, who had spent their lives with the deceased and were often in a sad state of grief, were obliged to stand by the bed while the body was chopped to pieces. The head was sawn open and examined; the liver and lights laid aside, the heart, on a silver salver, was given to one duchess and the entrails, in a big silver bowl, to another. Seven or eight doctors made notes of their gruesome findings and pronounced the causes of death; the only cause which invariably escaped their notice was their own incompetence.

It is not a very reassuring reflection that in another two hundred and fifty years present day doctors may seem to our descendants as barbarous as Fagon and his colleagues seem to us. The fashionable doctors, as different from the general practitioner as an Abbé de Cour from a Curé de Campagne, stood then as they do now, in admiration of their own science. As now, they talked as if illness and death were mastered. Molière has presented that sort of doctor once and for all; a consultation of big-wigs is ever a scene from one of his plays. The learned, magic, meaningless words, the grave looks at each other, the artful hesitation between one worthless formula and another — all are there. In those days, terrifying in black robes and bonnets, they bled the patients; now, terrifying in white robes and masks, they pump blood into him. The result is the same; the strong live; the weak, after much suffering and expense, both of spirit and of money, die. The ferocious blood-letting which was the fashion killed in two ways — exhaustion from want of blood and blood poisoning. Smallpox patients were regularly bled; they generally died. One doctor got so tired of seeing this happen that he exclaimed ‘Smallpox, I intend to get you used to bleeding’. After being bled the patient always felt much worse, and this was considered an excellent sign. The Comte de Toulouse, having bravely endured the operation for stone, was bled four times in twenty-four hours. Strong and young, he recovered. Twenty-six years later he received the same treatment for the same complaint, and died.

Laymen were divided on the subject of doctors; those who believed in them disapproved of those who did not — they thought them, as Molière put it, ‘impious in medicine’. But, alas, then as now, the most ardently impious when in pain and terror, were apt to change their minds, deliver themselves up to the self-styled experts, and die according to the rules. Mme de Maintenon and the King were rigidly pious in medicine and insisted on piety among those in their power; the King

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