Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage (best romance books of all time TXT) 📕

his own eyes; there is no deference to the authority of ancient wisdom; our masters are laid upon the shelf, and their axioms not one tittle the more regarded for being delivered in languages as defunct as the subjects of their application.”

However desirable it might seem to laugh at so whimsical a declamation, I had the good manners to resist the impulse; and not only that, but to inveigh bitterly against kermes, without knowing whether it was a vegetable or an animal, and to pour forth a commination of curses against the authors and inventors of so diabolical an engine. Scipio, observing my byplay in this scene, had a mind to come in for his share in the banter. “Most venerable prop of the true practice,” said he to Sangrado, “as I am descended in the third generation from a physician of the old school, give me leave to join you in your philippic against chemical conspiracies. My late illustrious progenitor⁠—heaven forgive him all his sins!⁠—was so warm a partisan of Hippocrates, that he often came to blows with ignorant pretenders, who vomited forth blasphemies against that high priest of the faculty. What is bred in the bone will not come out of the flesh: I could willingly inflict tortures and death with my own hands on those rash innovators whose daring enormities you have characterized with such accuracy of discrimination and such force of language. When wretches like these gain an ascendency in civilized society, can we wonder at the disjointed condition of the world?”

“The times are even more out of joint than you are aware of,” said the doctor. “My book against the vanities and delusions of the new practice might as well have fallen stillborn from the press; it seems, if anything, to have acted by contraries, and to have exasperated heresy. The apothecaries, like the Titans of old, heaping potion upon pill, and invading the Olympus of medicine, think themselves fully qualified to usurp and maintain the throne, now that it is only thought necessary to set open the doors, and to drive the enemy out at the portal or the postern by main force. They go to the length of infusing their deadly drugs into apozems and cordials, and then set themselves up against the most eminent of the fraternity. This contagion has spread its influence even among the cloisters. There are monks in our convents who unite surgery and pharmacy to the labors of the confessional. These medical baboons are always dipping their paws into chemistry, and inventing compositions strong enough to lay a scene of ecclesiastical mortality in the temperate abodes of peace and religion. Now, there are in Valladolid above sixty religious houses for both sexes: judge what ravage must have been made there by unmerciful pumping and the lancet misapplied.”

“Señor Sangrado,” said I, “you are perfectly in the right to give these poisoners no quarter. I utter groan for groan with you, and heave the philanthropic sigh over the invaded lives of our fellow-creatures, sinking under the fell attack of so heterodox a practice. It fills me with horror to think what a dead weight chemistry may one day be to medicine, just as adulterated coin operates on national credit. Far be that evil day from this generation.”

Just at this climax of our discourse, in came an old female servant, with a salver for the doctor, on which were a little light roll and a glass with two decanters, the one filled with water and the other with wine. After he had eaten a slice, he washed it down with a diluted beverage, two parts water to one of wine; but this temperate use of the good creature did not at all save him from the acrimony of my ridicule. “So, good master doctor,” said I, “you are fairly caught in the fact. You a wine-bibber? you, who have entered the lists like a knight-errant against that unauthenticated fermentation? you, who reached your grand climacteric on the strength of the pure element? How long have you been so at odds with yourself? Your time of life can be no excuse for the alteration? since, in one passage of your writings, you define old age to be a natural consumption, which withers and attenuates the system; and as an inference from that position, you reprobate the ignorance of those writers who dignify wine with the appellation of old men’s milk. What can you say, therefore, in your own defence?”

“You belabor me most unjustly,” answered the old physician. “If I drank neat wine, you would have a right to treat me as a deserter from my own standard; but your eyes may convince you that my wine is well mixed.”

“Another heresy, my dear apostle of the wells and fountains!” replied I. “Recollect how you rated the canon Sédillo for drinking wine, though plentifully dashed with the salubrious fluid. Own modestly and candidly that your theory was unfounded and fanciful, and that wine is not a poisonous liquor, as you have so falsely and scandalously libelled it in your works, any further than, like any other of nature’s bounties, it may be abused to excess.”

This lecture sat rather uneasily on our doctor’s feelings as a candidate for consistency. He could not deny his inveteracy against the use of wine in all his publications; but pride and vanity not allowing him to acknowledge the justice of my attack on his apostasy, he was left without a word to say for himself. Not wishing to push my sarcasm beyond the bounds of good humor, I changed the subject; and after a few minutes’ longer stay, took my leave, gravely exhorting him to maintain his ground against the new practitioners. “Courage, Señor Sangrado!” said I: “never be weary of setting your wits against kermes; and deafen the health-dispensing tribe with your thunders against the use of bleeding in the feet. If, spite of all your zeal and affection for medical orthodoxy, this empiric