In an earlier post I covered the executioners of Paris. Today I’ll write about professionals who killed far more people: doctors.
If you’ve ever visited the Museum of the History of Medicine in Paris and seen the medical instruments on display there, you may have drawn the inevitable conclusion that the guillotine was, apparently, an ancient cure for headaches. And indeed, medicine in the 17th and 18th centuries was especially primitive, and even the simplest medical procedure could end in the patient’s death. So it’s no surprise that in 1686, when Louis XIV had to undergo surgery to remove hemorrhoids, all of Paris held its breath…
The nuns who lived in Saint-Cyr, near Versailles, went so far as to write a song, “Grand Dieu sauve le Roi” (Great God, Save the King), and sang it while the king underwent surgery (with no anesthesia, of course). God heard their prayer, the surgery was a success, the king returned to his throne, and the nuns’ song became a hit. An Englishman who heard the hymn decided to import it to his own country, and about 60 years later the nuns’ hymn had turned into the famous anthem God Save the King. So, thanks to the hemorrhoids of the king of France, we got the British anthem that’s still sung today. History really does have a sense of humor.
Dr. Fagon Wipes Out Louis XIV’s Family
But back to Louis XIV. One of the king’s physicians was Dr. Guy Crescent Fagon (1638-1718). Guy began his career as the director of the botanical garden in Paris, and thanks to his wit and knowledge, he rose to become the king’s chief physician. Fagon believed in only two remedies, bloodletting and induced vomiting, and thanks to these remedies he managed to wipe out nearly the entire French royal family.
His first victim was Queen Marie-Thérèse of France (1638-1683), who suffered from an ulcer on her hand. Instead of removing the ulcer with a simple medical procedure, Fagon decided to bleed her, which caused the ulcer to burst. At the same time, the emetic he prescribed made the queen choke, and she died at age 43. Despite this, and perhaps thanks to the successful surgery he performed on the king three years later, Fagon managed to keep his position, and for about 30 years he kept himself busy killing off lower-ranking nobles.
In 1711, the dynasty seemed secure: the king had one son, three grandsons (one of whom was king of Spain), and two great-grandsons. But within just a year, all of this changed, and the House of Bourbon stood on the brink of extinction. The first to die, of smallpox, was the king’s son Louis, known as “the Grand Dauphin.” A year later, his heir, the duc de Bourgogne, died of measles, followed one after another by his wife and their son, the duc de Bretagne.
What all these deaths had in common was the treatment the patients received: bloodletting and emetics, administered liberally by Dr. Fagon. So within about two years, Louis XIV was left with a single heir, the two-year-old duc d’Anjou. But shortly after his elder brother died, it turned out that he too had measles. The one who saved his life was the duchesse de Ventadour (1654-1744), whom you can see in the picture above.
The duchess, who served as governess to the royal family, realized that if the duc d’Anjou received the same treatment as the rest of his family, his chances of survival were slim. So she “kidnapped” the duke from his doctors and locked herself in a room with him at the Palace of Versailles. There she treated the child with “grandmother’s remedies,” such as chicken soup. To her relief, and the king’s, after a few days the child recovered from the measles and got well. That child went on to inherit the French crown in 1715 under the name Louis XV. Since he was already orphaned of both parents, he came to see the duchesse de Ventadour as a substitute mother, and called her, until her death at age 90, “Mama Ventadour.”
Even though his treatments nearly killed off the entire royal family, Dr. Fagon kept his position until the death of Louis XIV from gangrene in his leg (that, at least, can’t be blamed on him). He spent the last three years of his life tending the king’s botanical garden, which we know today as the Jardin des Plantes, and there’s even a flower named after him, the fagonia. If there’s a lesson in this whole story, it’s that even today, it’s best to keep your distance from doctors and never take their word as gospel. In fact, more than one study has found that death rates dropped during doctors’ strikes…
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