RARE SATIRE ON THE MEDICAL PROFESSION
‘A.C.’ and ‘A.L.C.’
Dialogue entre un médecin et un homme du monde …
Paris, chez les marchands de nouveautés, 1824.
8vo, pp. 31, [1 (blank)]; a little foxing to half-title; very good; in nineteenth-century block-printed wrappers.
Rare first edition of this entertaining satirical dialogue between ‘M. de B.’ and ‘le docteur X’, taking a swipe at contemporary medicine and the medical profession.
Through the careful questioning of ‘M. de B.’ the doctor is prompted to make all manner of gaffes which reflect badly on the competence of his profession: if a patient dies, he states, it is because his illness was mortal, and at least the doctor is left with his body to dissect; treatments have necessarily changed over time since in 1600 man’s constitution was phlegmatic but by 1800 had become sanguine; there is no need for examinations to become a surgeon when a perfectly good system of nepotism exists; and it is utterly unreasonable to expect a doctor to treat anyone who cannot pay through the nose for it.
There are amusing exchanges regarding emetics and the recently established Académie Nationale de Médecine (which the doctor attended but was unable to hear a discourse on mutism), and the story of an old marchioness and her monkey who got diarrhoea from eating too many melons and subsequently died after taking purgatives (the monkey being stuffed).
No copies traced in the UK or US. OCLC records only one copy, at the BnF.
