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

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre (1914–2003), researched this long-awaited book with unusual meticulousness in the 1970s but, according to editor Blair Worden (to whom we owe its publication), it became “crowded out by other pre-occupations” (p. x). Leaving aside his famous and infamous work on Hitler, Oxford’s Regius Professor of History is best remembered as a historian of the religious, political, and ideological divisions in post-Reformation Europe. Why, then, did Mayerne occasion what Yale University Press puffs as “the most ambitious and most original of all Trevor-Roper’s books”?

The men are superficially similar: intellectuals who matured in times of con- flict, married above their station, liked the company of the rich and famous, and couldn’t finish a monograph. More seriously, perhaps, Trevor-Roper had concluded from his research in the sixteenth and twentieth centuries that “where absolute power is sustained and made terrible by ideology . . . the habitual professional purity of medicine will be broken down and the Hippocratic rules corrupted” (p. ix). More specifically, Paracelsian and chemical medicine became associated with radical Protestantism, and Galenism with conservative and Catholic forces.

Trevor-Roper presents the life of Theodore Turquet (1573–1655) or, as Turquet insisted, le Sieur de Mayerne, as a perfect example of the process. From his birth in a Geneva flooded with Huguenot refugees from the 1572 massacre, he was a lifelong Calvinist and supporter of international Protestantism—even as his patron Charles I was executed in London in God’s name in 1649. The polarized climate for medical practice was nowhere more evident than in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Paris. Like his Paracelsian mentor du Chesne, Mayerne’s career flourished under the patronage of Henri IV, Huguenot prince pragmatically turned Catholic monarch.

Henri’s assassination in 1610 left unrestrained the profoundly anti-Protestant forces of the Sorbonne medical faculty, the extremist dévots at court, and the Catholic church’s persistent convertisseurs. The conversion of prominent Huguenot intellectuals like Mayerne (and especially his friend Isaac Casaubon) offered grand victories in the ideological war. Trevor-Roper shows how the pressure became intolerable until Mayerne (and Casaubon) emigrated to London. Thus began the most complex period of Mayerne’s life. His new patron James I wanted to become leader of an informal coalition of Protestant Europe. If Casaubon resented his continuing co-option in the game, Mayerne revelled in it.

Trevor-Roper had argued before that rulers used court physicians as trusted envoys, even spies. I found his claim compromised by insufficient firm evidence, but he amassed plenty of evidence for Mayerne. Mayerne got frequent permissions to visit France and Switzerland. He had reasons: family to see, French clients to treat, and officially he was still médecin ordinaire du roi. But there were clandestine purposes: the coordination of armed Huguenot resistance in France, support for the Swiss cantons as the Thirty Years’ War intensified, and the recruitment of a Huguenot theologian for James I’s pamphlet war with Catholic apologists. When Mayerne was summarily expelled from France in 1618, England broke off diplomatic relations for seven months! Mayerne’s life soon became less interesting. James’s policy of coordinating a peaceful balance in Europe unravelled, and Charles had no such interests. He even denied Mayerne foreign travel, shrinking his role to that of a mere royal physician.

Trevor-Roper’s is a superlative guide to Mayerne’s international adventures. He disclaims expertise in the history of medicine, and the reader feels the lack of it, especially for the years after 1625. Mayerne played a key role in the creation of the Society of Apothecaries (1617) and the publication of the London Pharmacopoeia (1618). Mayerne also worked with William Harvey on a project for public health and the prevention of plague in 1631, he shared Hermetic and alchemical interests with Robert Fludd, and both were fellow royal physicians. In these medical matters...