Abstract

A contemporary chronicler described an apparent vivisection performed in Paris in 1475. Over the centuries, the story changed in every particular until it was believed to describe one of the triumphs of French surgery, the first surgical lithotomy. Widely known in the late nineteenth century, it had disappeared from histories of medicine by 1914, after its putative hero had been revealed as a historical phantom. This paper first examines the original story in the context of medicine in late medieval Paris. It then discusses the curious development of the story as an example of the growth and disappearance of a medical myth.

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