Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/603

 Feuillants in Languedoc. He traveled about the country offering to treat gratuitously all persons affected with stone in the bladder who were willing to trust him, and he made it a rule, whenever such a thing was possible, always to operate in the presence of one or more physicians or surgeons. He was also ready at all times to give instruction to those who wished to learn his method of procedure. He never asked to be remunerated, but was always pleased to receive from his patients a written testimonial of what he had done for them. Out of the moneys which he received from the rich he retained only that which he required for his own support and for the purchase of such instruments as he from time to time required; the balance he distributed among the poor. He was very faithful in performing his religious duties, and he succeeded in gaining the good will and esteem of everybody with whom he had any dealings.

For a long time it was customary in France to credit Frère Jacques (Fig. 26) with the invention of the lateral method of operating for stone in the bladder. This, however, was an error, for Franco, on page 95 of E. Nicaise's reproduction of the 1561 edition, describes this operation clearly. It must therefore have been invented a long time before Frère Jacques was born. The text (rendered into English) reads as follows: the incision should be made between the anus and the testicles, two or three finger-breadths to one side of the commissure or perinaeum [median line of the perinaeum]." This is said to be the earliest clear description of the first step of the lateral operation of which we have any knowledge.

In 1697, when Frère Jacques visited Paris, he had already attained wide celebrity as a lithotomist; the number of his successful operations—all of which had been performed according to the lateral method of procedure—having reached a grand total of several thousand. He therefore had a right to suppose that his visit would prove acceptable to the physicians of that metropolis; but the published account of this visit reveals plainly the fact that the surgeons of that city were not at all pleased that an itinerant lithotomist from one of the provinces should have the