Medical Interests
The fields of botany and medicine were closely allied, and many botanists would have said of their discipline what Clave said of chemistry, that good health was its principal aim. The Academy rejected such a single-minded purpose and subordinated medical aims to scholarly ones. Nevertheless, medical interests remained important to academicians and decisively affected their research, partly because of their previous training and partly because of demands made by the Academy's protectors.[1]
Botanical research for medical purposes took several forms at the Academy. Academicians examined the nutritive value of plants, their uses as materia medica, and the hazards of ingesting diseased plants; they also investigated chemical medicine. Such research was important from an institutional point of view, because academicians used medical goals to shield their controversial and apparently unproductive research on plants. When asked to disband an obstinate project, academicians were able to continue some aspects of their research, albeit minimally, on the grounds that they were looking, as required, for its medical applications.
But medical goals were not an artificial construct intended only to conceal deeper, more controversial interests. On the contrary, the conviction that their activities were valuable to medicine unified a group of researchers whose approaches to botanical studies were sometimes incompatible. Academicians hoped to serve society by improving medical practice and by suggesting legislation to protect the health of the French populace. In 1689, for example, they investigated remedies for dysentery, a disorder that had afflicted Paris the year before.[2] Nowhere, however, is their sense of obligation to the public, and especially the poor, clearer than in Dodart's analysis of the cause of ergotism, as will be seen subsequently.
The continuity and strength of medical interests are explained in part by the education of the many academicians who had been trained as physicians, surgeons, or apothecaries. Seven of nineteen in 1667 had medical backgrounds. Claude Bourdelin had been apothecary to the Dauphin, had a shop for medicaments in Paris, and is said to have practiced medicine, although he was not a physician. Louis Gayant was a Paris surgeon who died serving the king's armies in that capacity. La Chambre, a graduate of Montpellier, was ordinary physician to Louis XIII and taught at the Jardin
royal; Duclos was ordinary physician to Louis XIV. Nicolas Marchant studied medicine at Padua, while Jean Pecquet took his degree at Montpellier, was physician to Fouquet, and was indebted to Gayant in his anatomical research.[3]
Before the reorganization in 1699, eleven more medical practitioners were appointed. Dodart, Jean Méry, and Simon Boulduc served members of the French royal family; Langlade was later first physician to the queen of Spain.[4] Homberg studied medicine at Padua and Bologna and took his degree at Wittenberg, while Moyse Charas, a Protestant apothecary who moved to England in 1685 and took a medical degree there, had attended Huygens during a serious illness in 1670 only to be lumped together with Huygens's physicians as being timid, ignorant, and reliant on "Galenical methods & prescriptions."[5] Du Verney had ties with the medical faculty at Avignon.[6] Of all the physician-academicians admitted before 1699, only Dodart, Tournefort, and Tauvry took degrees in medicine at the Parisian faculty, although others had ties of family and friendship with that faculty. Tournefort had studied at Montpellier and Orange before coming to Paris, and Tauvry took his first medical degree at Angers. The foreign associate Domenico Guglielmini was a doctor in medicine from Bologna, and nearly all that is known of Morin de Toulon is that he also was trained as a doctor.[7]
Members' medical training or experiences flavored their contributions to meetings of the Academy.[8] Several wrote books about Galenic and chemical medicines, mineral waters, and the treatment of specific illnesses, both before and after their entry into the Academy.[9] With 29 percent of its members before 1699 trained for medical professions, the Academy had a stronger representation of such interests than the Royal Society, where 14 to 20 percent of members between 1663 and 1687 were medical practitioners.[10] The domination of the biological sciences by medical practitioners was a most important characteristic of the Company, as of the biological sciences generally in Europe at this time.[11]
Had academicians' previous training and research not been enough to sustain their interest, there was also the stimulus of official pressure. This became acute in 1686, when Louvois criticized the Academy's work in botany and chemistry because it could not cure the king. Louvois wanted academicians to emphasize the practical, especially medical, uses of plants. In particular, he wanted them to challenge controversial empirics and hidebound faculties of medicine.[12] The last concern was a traditional strategy of royal patronage, whose iconoclastic favorites included Théophraste Renaudot, the Journal des sçavans , and the Jardin royal.[13]
Despite official encouragement, however, the Academy did not wish to
become an arbiter of medical theory and practice, although it did hope to improve medical knowledge.[14] It found earlier treatises deficient because their authors did not explain the effects of plants on humans, describe the frequency or size of doses, state for what illnesses a remedy was most appropriate, or explain when in the course of an illness to take the medicine.[15] Academicians proposed to remedy these defects by testing medicines, poisons, and antidotes on human subjects, but they were thwarted. Dodart wanted to try out antidotes on criminals condemned to death but could not obtain permission to do so; instead he suggested checking safe medicaments on humans and hazardous ones on animals.[16] Bourdelin planned in 1667 to assess all remedies listed in chemical treatises and to provide them to hospitals for experiments with patients, but he was barred from doing so by hospital guardians.[17] Instead academicians studied bloods, dissected cadavers, solicited advice from physicians, analyzed unfamiliar remedies chemically, and used as guinea pigs various animals, their own patients, and themselves.[18] The Academy also investigated chemical medicine, with Duclos a staunch advocate of potable gold and other controversial remedies.[19] Above all, members analyzed plants, selecting for study those believed to have medical or nutritional value.[20]
Although the Academy had no desire to challenge the medical faculties outright, its discussions of medical issues were empirical and thus antipathetic to the way French universities taught medicine.[21] Its work was implicitly reformist, moreover, for academicians tried to purify known medications, to produce new ones from distillants, and to publish hitherto secret cures.[22] The Academy embraced members with divergent positions,[23] and individual academicians were eclectic on medical issues, being neither strict Paracelsians nor unreformed Galenists. The Paracelsian Duclos used Galenic terminology to describe the action of drugs.[24] Dodart valued chemical analysis and sought new remedies from the distillants of plants, but his theory of digestion followed Galenic principles rather than contemporary acid-alkali theories.[25] Charas's pharmacopoeia promoted the chemical preparation of remedies from animal, vegetable, and mineral substances, especially by distillation, but allowed individual mineral cures on pragmatic grounds.[26] His empirical eclecticism is representative of the Academy's therapeutics.
Medical interests had both negative and positive effects on the Academy's research. The Academy established its scientific program to be independent of medical research. Yet its natural philosophical inquiries remained episodic partly because they were irrelevant to medicine. When the crown demanded that academicians address medical needs, this injured
the broader program without yielding many practical results. Yet no academician argued that the Academy should refuse to seek medically useful information, and in one important respect that search benefited the Academy. That is, in a Company split by personal rivalries and disparate ideologies, threatened during the 1680s by ministerial intervention, and discouraged by intransigent chemical analysis, medical interests were a unifying force. When other aims and activities foundered, research on plants for medical purposes was acceptable to government, chemists, botanists, and natural philosophers — indeed to all with responsibility for the activity and development of the Academy.