Turquet de Mayerne as Baroque Physician: The Art of Medical Portraiture (review)

Turquet de Mayerne, a larger-than-life court physician who was painted by Rubens, is a fabulous subject for a historian. That he kept elaborate notes about some of the cases he dealt with over many years renders him exceptionally interesting to historians of medicine. Although he did not publish much in his lifetime, he wrote a great deal and approached his clinical activities with what appear to be unusually high levels of self-awareness and thoughtfulness. He moved in elevated social circles that included the royal families of France and England, courtiers, and other aristocrats and members of the gentry. He was both famous and rich.

There are a number of ways in which such an individual might be approached. It might be thought that the title of this book announced rather clearly the ones Brian Nance has decided to take, for it contains two key ideas: first, that what is normally considered a style term, "baroque," is applicable to Mayerne; and second, that the art of portraiture is somehow central to his life and work. Such an assumption would be misleading, however. The book is in fact a series of rather short chapters that mainly expound Turquet de Mayerne's medical position. It begins with the biographical background before turning to some of the casebooks; unfortunately, it is not made clear why the notes from one particular period, 1611-24, were chosen for detailed analysis. Aspects of those casebooks are then discussed in order to tell readers how Turquet de Mayerne thought about the medical problems he saw, and what kinds of treatments he gave. Some information about specific patients is given along the way, although only one—Prince Henry, who died in 1612—is discussed in any detail. The chapter devoted to the prince's death, and to the controversies surrounding it, is certainly the most successful and lively in the book.

Very little is in fact said about "the art of medical portraiture," which turns out to be a way of conveying Turquet de Mayerne's interest in the individuality of his patients. Nance explains that "just as a good portrait conveys a sense of a person's unique being, so a good medical portrait produces a sketch of the patient's particular collection of conditions" (p. 78). The discussion of what Turquet de Mayerne is doing as portraiture never goes any deeper than that, which is a bit surprising. It would be possible to explore the similarities and differences between artistic and medical portraiture, and even to think about the artistic portraits of some of Turquet de Mayerne's patients. Such a discussion might also have helped Nance conceptualize the whole question of Turquet de Mayerne's public life more effectively. He helpfully stresses the concern to keep notes as a way of protecting oneself against criticism; court physicians certainly had to worry about their reputations, their "public" faces. But in fact, medical practice, and especially its outcomes, is characterized by an ambivalent relationship between "public" and "private." The whole point of commissioned portraits is that they have a public embodied life that neither artist nor sitter can control: they can be reproduced as prints, participate in a variety of displays, act as gifts, and so on. Nance is very keen to stress the public side of Turquet de Mayerne. But he does not explain precisely how the manuscripts concerning Prince Henry's death functioned as "public accounts," or even as a portrait—to take the most striking example.

Only four pages at the end of the book discuss the ways in which the term "baroque" is relevant to medicine and to this particular...