critique, en mettant l`accent sur la question des normes et des règles

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critique, en mettant l’accent sur la question des normes et des règles régissant les
usages du corps et ses représentations au sein de diverses pratiques et régimes
de discours. La section « Doctrines médicales et textualité » s’interroge sur les
intersections, parfois inattendues, entre l’écriture et des courants médicauxphilosophiques, tels que le matérialisme et la physiologie françaises des XVIIIe et
XIXe siècles, qui postulent une réinterprétation renouvelée du rapport âmecorps. Ann Thomson étudie les liens unissant la médecine et le matérialisme en
s’intéressant particulièrement à La Mettrie et à Diderot, alors que Caroline Jacot
Grappa se penche sur le cas du Rêve de d’Alembert de Diderot en examinant la figure de l’araignée. Dans son article consacré au « roman de la médecine », Juan
Rigoli nous fait découvrir un genre littéraire en vogue au XIXe siècle, celui des
physiologies. À côté de La physiologie du mariage de Balzac, on retrouve ainsi
plusieurs titres tout aussi intéressants et qui permettent de comprendre la question des liens entourant la littérature et la médecine : La physiologie de l’homme,
La physiologie du bien et du mal, La physiologie de la médecine, etc.
Enfin, la quatrième et dernière section est consacrée aux « Mises en récit de la
maladie ». On y retrouve des contributions de Xavier Le Person sur la description de la maladie dans les lettres du XVIe siècle, de Clark Lawlor sur la consomption et la maladie dans le roman Clarissa (1740) de Samuel Richardson, et
un excellent texte d’Alexandre Wenger sur les dangers de la lecture de romans
pour la santé, qui, croit-on alors, « exercent une influence sur le moral et le
physique des lecteurs ».
Cet ouvrage ne se limite pas, comme on pourrait le croire, à une invitation à
penser la médecine à partir d’œuvres littéraires, ni à une étude de cas singuliers.
Il ne s’agit donc pas tant de proposer une histoire littéraire de la médecine
comme le fait le tout dernier ouvrage de Jean-Paul Thomas3, mais plutôt de
proposer une réflexion originale sur le rapport de la médecine à la littérature en
examinant les enjeux scientifiques et esthétiques des deux disciplines et en attirant l’attention sur des œuvres oubliées ou méconnues. On soulignera en effet
l’importance de la bibliographie pour chacune des contributions, qui, elle seule,
est riche d’enseignement pour quiconque s’intéresse à cette question.
LUCIE DESJARDINS
Université du Québec à Montréal
1 Georges S. Rousseau, « Literature and Medicine : The State of the Field », Isis, 72
(1981): 406-424.
2 Georges Vigarello, Histoire de la beauté : le corps et l’art d’embellir de la Renaissance à nos
jours (Paris : Seuil, 2004), p. 336 ; Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine et Georges
Vigarello, (eds.) Histoire du corps (Paris : Seuil, 2005), 3 vol.
3 Jean-Paul Thomas, La plume et le scalpel. La médecine au prisme de la littérature (Paris,
PUF, 2008).
Europe’s Physician. The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne
Hugh Trevor-Roper
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. xii + 438 p., US$35.00
When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, the oil for her anointing—a
fragrant mixture of distilled orange and jasmine flowers, oil of rose and cinnamon, ambergris, civet, musk, and spirits of rosemary—was compounded according to a recipe first used at the coronation of Charles I. Its author was Charles’s
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physician, Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, a Huguenot who had left the court of
France for England after the assassination of Henri IV in 1610. The oil was manufactured by another Huguenot, the royal apothecary Nicolas le Myre. A third
Huguenot, Mayerne’s friend Nicolas Briot, designed the special gold coins distributed as coronation largesse.
This anecdote could serve as an epitome of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s riveting
biography of Mayerne. As a physician, Mayerne interests us because of his links
to royal courts and the Calvinist intelligentsia, and his advocacy of chemical
remedies. However for Trevor-Roper, Mayerne is primarily a representative of
what he calls the “Protestant international.” This is one of several deliberate
anachronisms (another being “internal migration”) designed to evoke a dark
affinity between the first half of the 17th century and the first half of the 20th—
the two periods which Trevor-Roper marked out as his professional domain.
Trevor-Roper completed this book in 1979, and though he tinkered with the
text for decades afterwards, he never tried to publish it. His mastery of the primary sources—Mayerne’s papers, but also the political, polemical and medical
literature of the period, largely in Latin—is exceptional; but in consequence of
the publication delay, the secondary scholarship consulted, particularly on medical history, is dated. It is also rather sparse. Yet the title of Europe’s Physician
announces a claim, at least on some level, to be medical history, and TrevorRoper advances some strong arguments for his subject’s importance to medicine.
Mayerne “was the founder of clinical medicine in England. He was the first
physician to keep detailed notes on his patients” (p. 4), which were a “great
innovation in therapy”; “he would begin his study with a general psychosomatic
profile, then proceed to a survey (Theoria) of the disease, and finally set out a
practical cure” (p. 167). Historians of medicine are likely to be uncomfortable
with the Whiggish hyperbole, and regret the lack of attention to the form and
purpose of the casebooks. These are records of consultations modeled on
medieval consilia, probably intended for publication; however, as Brian Nance
points out in his Tourquet de Mayerne as Baroque Physician (Amsterdam, 2001),
they also functioned as insurance against accusations of malpractice, and are not
invariably candid. On the other hand, Trevor-Roper actually underestimates, but
also misconstrues, Mayerne’s truly significant role in the formation of the Society of Apothecaries and the creation of the London pharmacopoeia. As Harold
J. Cook has shown, these were elements of a concerted Stuart campaign to dismantle the power of the City of London by creating new guilds. Trevor-Roper
paints Mayerne as a disinterested reformer; yet he secured from Charles a
monopoly on distilling strong waters, which was transformed into a charter for
yet another crown-sponsored guild, the Company of Distillers. The king’s physician thus contributed actively to the policies which led to the Civil War.
Though Trevor-Roper often misses the point of Mayerne’s medical activities,
and never provides a satisfactory account of the theory and practice of chemical
medicine, Europe’s Physician is nonetheless an important book for medical historians of the early modern period. What it conveys—and perhaps only TrevorRoper could convey it—is the terrible, turbulent world in which Mayerne’s career
played out. The physician himself is the emblem, more than the subject, of this
book—the vanishing point, so to speak, of Trevor-Roper’s monumental canvas of
political storm and stress in 17th-century Europe. In consequence, Mayerne on
occasion almost vanishes altogether. The account of the row between the court
iatrochemists and the faculty Galenists in Paris is largely about Joseph du Chesne,
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not Mayerne; and the chapter on the collapse of the continental Protestant cause
in the late 1620s juxtaposes a breathtaking account of the débâcle with an embarrassing portrait of Mayerne badgering the French court for his arrears of salary,
and buying a castle in Switzerland. Trevor-Roper’s effort to justify Mayerne’s
disengagement as a stoic retreat into the inner citadel of the self-sufficient Calvinist soul may fail to convince. But if one reads Europe’s Physician as an elegy for the
demise of “the old ideals of the Protestant international” and for the world of
humanist learning, including medical learning, it is both moving and instructive. The life of Mayerne, so rich in documentation and yet so enigmatic, is a
surprisingly fine precipice from which to view a whole epoch.
FAITH WALLIS
McGill University
Hospital Politics in Seventeenth-Century France: The Crown, Urban Elites
and the Poor
The History of Medicine in Context Series
Tim McHugh
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, xi + 191 p., £55.00
Revisiting historical events and their interpretations has always been the bread
and butter of historians. In this book, Tim McHugh returns to the work of
numerous social historians to take another look at what he claims to be their
“statist” and “Marxist” interpretations. He argues that most of his predecessors
described how the Crown during the 17th century attempted to build up a network of hospitals and hospices to receive the sick and the poor as well as to set
up establishments to confine beggars and vagabonds, to reform and retrain
them through compulsory assistance at mass, confession, moral lessons, and
forced labour.
McHugh argues that rather than following this “orthodox” historical tradition
and seeking out edicts and directives to show that the Crown was responsible
for the initiatives and directives that led to “hospital reform,” he has looked to
other sources. He builds up his case using the writings of humanist thinkers,
nobles, and Catholic reformation leaders. Studying the texts of Humanist and
Mercantilist writers like Jean Bodin, Montchretien, and Laffemas, of Catholic
thinkers like François de Sales, Molina and the Compagnie de Saint Sacrament,
and of noble reformers like the Duc de Luynes or Boulainvilliers, McHugh revisits the evolution of poor relief and of hospital reform.
Instead of seeing the encroachment of the state in the field of poor relief during the 16th and 17th centuries, McHugh shows that his texts reflect the continual
repetition of the royal directives of the 1566 Edict of Moulins. This edict ordered
local communities to assume the responsibility for their poor, to aid them, house
them, feed them. He does not see any indication that the Crown was really interested in the early stages of what has been called the “great confinement movement,” in the building of the Paris Hôpital General in 1656 or in the subsequent
order for all major towns to construct similar institutions.
Looking at social welfare in Paris and in the provinces, McHugh studied
how local reformers led the way to improving hospital services at the Paris
Hôtel-Dieu and at the new Hôpital General. In the case of the Hôtel-Dieu he
shows how increased local taxation and charitable bequests permitted new