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

This book is a celebration of a long and fruitful life and a reminder that some voices speak from the grave. Sir Theodore Mayerne was born in Geneva in 1573, studied medicine in Montpellier, then moved to Paris in the late 1590s and began to practice medicine. He worked with the royal physicians Joseph du Chesne (Quercetanus) and Jean Ribit, sieur de la Rivière, forming a Huguenot and Hermetic triumvirate who defended chemical medicine against the jealous orthodoxy of the Paris Medical Faculty. After the assassination of Henry IV in 1610, Mayerne faced increasing pressure to convert to Roman Catholicism, and he moved to England as chief physician to James VI and I. The king trusted his medical and his political judgments alike, defending him against accusations of foul play in the death of Prince Henry and sending him to Paris and Geneva with messages in support of international Protestantism. The death of James in 1625, like the death of Henry IV fifteen years before, signaled the decline of the Protestant cause and marked a new phase of Mayerne's life. Too political to keep close, too valuable to let go, Charles I kept him at arms' length. Mayerne would live in London for the rest of his life, renowned as a great physician, amassing a fortune, witnessing the demise of the monarchy, and surviving nine of his ten children. He died in 1655 at the age of eighty-two, soon followed by his second wife, leaving a sole daughter as his financial heir and his protégé, John Calladon, to perpetuate his medical legacy. He had amassed dozens of notebooks, mostly medical casebooks, some alchemical studies, and — most famously — some on the technical details of oil painting, but he failed to write the book about medicine that he had always planned.

Hugh Trevor-Roper tells the story of Mayerne's life. The historian tracks the physician across the great cities of Europe and into the private chambers of its rulers, politicians, and scholars. Through his eyes we see the failure of a Protestant peace and the successful reform of medicine. Medical disputes and political intrigues are charted with verve; his quieter years, beginning with the reign of Charles I, find him at the center of a community of Huguenot refugees, a wealthy, fat doctor, stubbornly resisting the language of his adopted country, authoritative with his patients, domineering of his wayward sons. He was always in the company of great men, renowned for their piety, learning, wealth, or power. Trevor-Roper's brisk prose captures their hopes and fears, affections and loathings, achievements and disappointments. Some receive kind words, others harsh: there is no shortage of wit in this book. Trevor-Roper wrote as the great physician's last companion. What began as a relationship between a biographer and his chosen subject became something more. As Mayerne could not turn his mass of papers into his great book, so Trevor-Roper could not complete his study of Mayerne.

Most of the book was written in 1979, but it remained unfinished at the author's death in 2003. It has been carefully finished for him. Quiet editorial work has smoothed the text, leaving only occasional gaps, though more appear in the final chapter. Prudently, I think, Trevor-Roper's candid dialogue with his recalcitrant subject remains. There are moments of exasperation: "Mayerne was not concerned to help a future biographer. He was not interested in chronology. Although he was continually making notes, he was, in many ways, unsystematic; and he seldom completed any project" (55). Moments of disappointment: "It seems he had a psychological incapacity to finish a book" (99). Moments of sympathy: "He would write a book. It was the doomed ambition of his life" (347). This book is a monument to the shrewd judgments and enduring ambitions of both men.