Guy Patin

Guy Patin: The Last Great Defender of Bleeding

On 22 March 1648, the most quotable physician in Paris sat down and denounced tea as "the impertinent novelty of the century." A doctor named Philibert Morisset had defended the leaf in a university thesis; Patin reported with satisfaction that copies were burned and protests lodged with the dean. He was, at that moment, doing what he did for fifty years — standing at the door of French medicine and refusing to let anything new come in. That he was wrong about nearly all of it is the smaller half of the story.

The Faculty Man

Patin was born in 1601 at Hodenc-en-Bray in the Oise, north-west of Paris, and he died in Paris on 30 August 1672. Between those dates he made himself the embodiment of the Paris Faculty of Medicine at the exact moment that institution was at its most powerful and least curious. He served as its dean from 1650 to 1652, and from 1655 he held a chair at the Collège de France — the two positions that, together, let a man speak for French medicine with something close to authority.

The medicine he spoke for was Galenic and ancient. Its instruments were the lancet and the purge. Bleeding and evacuation were not, to Patin, one option among several; they were medicine itself, the correct application of a theory of the body that had held for fifteen centuries and required no supplement. He is the physician who makes sense of Molière — modern scholars have noted the resemblance between Patin and the pompous, Latin-spouting doctors the playwright was skewering in the same city at the same time — and the comparison is not entirely unfair. His own scientific and medical work is generally judged uninspired.

The Ruin of Théophraste Renaudot

The clearest measure of Patin's power is what he did with it. Théophraste Renaudot had established his Bureau d'adresse in Paris in 1630 and by 1640 was offering free medical consultations to the poor, using remedies the Faculty regarded as heretical. He was protected by Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII, and while they lived the Faculty could do little but seethe.

Richelieu died in 1642. With the patronage gone, Patin and his academic colleagues moved, and Renaudot lost his permission to practise medicine in Paris. The parlement ordered him to surrender the letters patent for both his bureau and his mont-de-piété, the pawnshop he had set up to lend to the poor at low interest. A charitable enterprise was dismantled, and Patin's fingerprints are on the dismantling. It is the episode that makes it impossible to read him purely as a comic figure: he was a guild officer defending a monopoly, and he won.

Against Antimony

The great pharmaceutical war of the century was fought over antimony, the heavy metal that Paracelsus had introduced into European medicine as the flagship of his mineral cures. Wine left overnight in an antimony cup absorbed enough of the metal to induce violent vomiting and purging when drunk, with results that ranged from dramatic recovery to death. One surviving antimonial cup in the Royal College of Physicians' collection may have killed at least two of the people who used it.

Patin's verdict on the mineral pharmacy has outlived most of his other opinions: "May God protect us from such drugs and physicians!" France banned antimony for a century. It is worth pausing on the irony here, because it is genuine and it cuts both ways. Patin opposed antimony for the wrong reasons — because it was new, because it was Paracelsian, because it came from outside the Faculty rather than because he had evidence it poisoned people. And he was, in strict outcome terms, right. Antimony was a heavy-metal poison. His reflexive conservatism produced a correct answer by accident, which is the most useful thing that can be said for reflexive conservatism.

The Letters

None of this is why Patin is still read. He survives on his correspondence — thousands of letters written in a light, playful, malicious French that constitutes one of the richest documentary sources historians have for the medical, intellectual and political life of seventeenth-century Paris. He gossiped about colleagues, reported the movement of books and rumours, recorded who had died and of what, and complained magnificently.

He was close to Gabriel Naudé, librarian of the Bibliothèque Mazarine and one of the great bibliographers of the age; their table talk was collected after both were dead as *Naudaeana et Patiniana*, published in Paris in 1701 and Amsterdam in 1703. He wrote occasional verse, including a quatrain honouring the Dutchman Henric Piccardt. And, with his son Charles, he dealt clandestinely in books — a sideline that places the Faculty's chief enforcer of orthodoxy in the underground trade of forbidden texts, and has led scholars to group him with the philosophical libertines of the early seventeenth century.

Why Guy Is Called a Genius

The case must be built carefully, because the obvious case fails. Patin discovered nothing. His medical theory was inherited, his therapeutics were wrong, and his most consequential professional act was crushing a man who gave free treatment to the poor. He is credited in some accounts with the earliest description of fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, the disease in which bone grows through connective tissue — though the case is conventionally dated 1692, twenty years after his death, which should make anyone cautious about the attribution.

What he possessed instead was a literary gift of a very particular kind: the ability to render a whole professional world in prose, in real time, without meaning to. His letters are funnier and more alive than almost anything written by contemporaries who were trying to be literature. He had perfect pitch for the telling detail, an instinct for the phrase that survives — "the impertinent novelty of the century" is still quoted four hundred years later — and a documentary honesty about his own prejudices that makes him unusually reliable as a witness even when he is unreliable as a physician.

So: not a scientific genius, and no serious historian has called him one. A minor genius of correspondence and self-portraiture, whose value to posterity is precisely inverse to his value to his patients. He is read today because he was the wittiest wrong man of his century, and because he wrote everything down.

Legacy

Patin's reputation has inverted completely. In his lifetime he was an authority on medicine and a nobody in letters; today he is a footnote in medicine and a primary source in history. His correspondence remains indispensable to anyone reconstructing how the Paris Faculty actually worked, how new remedies were resisted, and what educated Parisians thought and feared during the Fronde and the early reign of Louis XIV. He also stands as the durable case study in a problem medicine never fully solved — the professional body that mistakes the defence of its own authority for the defence of its patients. He guarded the gate for fifty years, and the century walked past him.

Achievements

• Notable work: Lettres de Gui Patin
• Held posts at Collège de France