Europe's Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (review)

Using the life of the Huguenot physician, Sir Theodore de Mayerne, as a template, the author has presented the separate struggles of religion and medicine that consumed Europe in the seventeenth century. Apparently Trevor-Roper conceived, researched, and wrote most of this biography by 1979, occasionally revising and adding to it after his retirement in 1987, but never bringing it close to publication. After Trevor-Roper's death in 2003, Professor Blair Worden completed the manuscript and it was published in 2006. The amount of research that Trevor-Roper did to present de Mayerne's life in its entirety is impressive. The thoughtfulness and skill of Worden in getting the manuscript completed and edited are noteworthy.

Born of a Geneva Huguenot family in 1573, the year following the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of Huguenots in France, Theodore Turquet's life was shaped by the long fight of French Protestants to survive in France with a Roman Catholic Church of ever-increasing political power and ever-decreasing tolerance. Educated in Basel and Montpellier, he assumed a status above that of his birth and became de Mayerne, leaving his family surname, Turquet, behind. By 1598, he was practicing medicine in Paris, part of the Huguenot medical community, and clearly identified with the disciples of Paracelsus, physicians who believed in chemical treatment of disease, which was anathema to the reigning Galenist philosophy of the powerful Medical Faculty of Paris.

Despite his relatively tender age, Huguenot identity, and keen interest in chemical treatments, Mayerne, as Trevor-Roper names him, was soon a popular consultant physician, even enjoying an appointment as physician to King Henry IV. For reasons unclear, he made a lengthy visit to England in 1606 and then, after the murder of King Henry IV, moved to London permanently in 1611, always intending to return to the continent to live but never doing so.

As the fortunes of the Huguenots in France diminished, those of the popular London consultant physician, now Sir Theodore de Mayerne, increased. He was principal physician to James VI and I and cared for various of the Stuarts of three generations. His skills as a physician made him the equal of Dr. William Harvey and also made him very wealthy. Trevor-Roper provides a rich background from primary sources to show Mayerne as a shrewd physician and also a tireless expatriate champion of the Huguenot cause, often serving as a foreign agent, and not above playing the role of a spy.

Mayerne was ahead of his time in making careful clinical notes on many of his patients, largely collected in his Ephemerides, in the Sloane MSS 2058-2076, parts of which, in translation from Latin, can be read with interest by thoughtful modern physicians. He was instrumental in bringing chemical treatment of disease into the mainstream of medicine, for example being one of the physicians who created the first English pharmacopoeia. The divide between the Galenists and the "chemical physicians"—never a problem of great magnitude in England—eased considerably, even in France, during his lifetime.

Mayerne's hope that he would establish a dynasty to follow him, situated in the baronial castle he purchased in Switzerland, imploded over much the same span of time that his beloved Huguenot society did in France. Two wives gave him eight children over a space of forty years, and though several of them married, he saw no grandchildren by the end of his long life of eighty-two years. Indeed, there never were grandchildren at all. His voluminous papers, which he presumed would be published, have languished, notably in the Sloane MSS of the British Library, unpublished and rarely viewed. Sadly, all of his efforts in the Huguenot cause came to naught, for by the end of his life in 1655 their position in France was so constricted that many fled, not only to Holland and England but to places as far distant as South Africa...