Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/536

532 of the day before Christmas, 1776, and his old enemy, Bouvart, who seems to have always kept him in mind for judicial hanging, vented his glee in an epigram which, for venom, matches up with what Louis XIV said as the cortège of la Montespan passed by in the driving sleet: Je n'aurais pas cru quil fût mort horizontalement!"

At the present time, the scientific reputation of Bordeu is of the slenderest kind. He is one of the gods of the old Montpellier faculty. In his relation to the fashionable mineral springs of the Pyrenees—Pau, Barèges, Bagnères—he seems the original, indeed, the archetypal Badearzt. He was a good anatomist, a piquant writer on medical history, a promoter of variolation. His view of the brain, the heart and the stomach as "the tripod of life" made its fortune in its day, and he achieved a great reputation by his revival of the complex pulse-lore or ars sphygmica of Galen and the Chinese physicians, a phase of eighteenth century medicine which Dr. Weir Mitchell pithily described as "observation gone minutely mad." In the history of medicine these distinctions count for very little. Bordeu, who died on the eve of the Revolution, was doubtless one of the giants before the flood, but, as compared with the great names of those who came aprés le deluge—Bichat, Louis, Laënnec, Bretonneau, Andral, Pinel, such clinical "genius" as he had acquires the ghostly implication conveyed in the original meaning of the term. It has been said that every physician of florid or fashionable reputation has in him something of the charlatan, and there are anecdotes about Bordeu which show that he was no exception to the rule. But there are one or two things which make him an important connecting link between the outmoded, pompous, pedantic French medicine of the old régime and the brilliant and truly scientific output of the Napoleonic period and after. Bordeu appears to have been the first anatomist to employ the term "tissue," and his "Recherches sur le tissu muqueux ou l'organe cellulaire" (1767) immediately suggest the great Bichat, whom he influenced, it is true, but in a most untoward way. By tissu muqueux, which he also calls l'organe cellulaire, Bordeu means neither cellular structures as Schleiden and Schwann saw them nor protoplasm as Purkinje and Schultze saw it, but simply such vague protoplasmic configurations as were visible through a lower-power microscope. It was his ambition to confirm and uphold the humoral pathology of Hippocrates, and he regarded the three Hippocratic stages of disease, irritation, coction and crisis, as dependent upon the glandular and other secretions. Corresponding with the different organs and secretions, he classified diseases, not according to their clinical or pathological manifestations, but arbitrarily as cachexias, of which he devised a prodigious list, e, g., bilious, mucous, albuminous, fatty, splenic, seminal, urinary, stercoral, perspiratory; with an equally complex classification of the pulse as critical, non-critical, nasal, tracheal,