THE ICONOGRAPHY OF SIR THEODORE TURQUET DE MAYERNE, M.D., BARON OF AUBONNE, PHYSICIAN TO THREE KINGS—DIPLOMATIST, CHEMIST, AND CLINICAL CASE RECORDER By THOMAS GIBSON, M.B., C.M. (Edin.)* KINGSTON, ONTARIO Fore wo rd James I, in 1611, sent an embassy with IR THEODORE’S Turquet for- letters patent offering Mayerne the post bears were Piedmontese Prot- of chief physician to the royal house- hold. He held the same office during the next reign, and retired to Chelsea after | estants first observed as residents the death of the Royal Martyr, having S of Chieri,1 a town southeast of served royalty for fifty-five years. Turin. The smaller town of Magherno1 He died in his eighty-second year, is not far off, and his branch of the leaving an estate of one hundred and family may have taken their territorial forty thousand pounds.3 His medical cognomen from it. Mayerne is not legacy to posterity was the large collec- known as a place name in Italy. tion of case records and pharmaceutical His parents were citizens of Lyon2 formulae which reveals to us the curious before his birth, and when the slaughter farrago of the medicine of the seven- of St. Bartholomew spread to the prov- teenth century. He was an amateur in inces they escaped into Switzerland, chemistry all his life, and discovered4 at where, at Geneva, Theodore was born least one pigment for the use of minia- in September 1573. (Date of baptism in turists. The black wash of mercurous the cathedral of St. Peter was 1st Oc- oxide is the only preparation of May- tober 1573.) Theodore Beza was his god- erne’s still in our pharmacopoeia. His father. “eau cordiale”5 is still enjoyed as a Precocious as a schoolboy, he took his liqueur at Geneva. degree in Arts at Heidelberg and his The coronation oil, from the time of m.d . degree at Montpellier. Proceeding Edward the Confessor to the Reforma- at once to Paris, he was able, in 1603, tion, had been a mixture of olive oil to purchase one of the posts of “Mede- and balm of Gilead. This did not keep cins par Quartier,” two of whom served well nor smell very fragrant.6 A new oil under the chief physician for three was desired for the coronation of months in each year. Like his com- Charles I. Mayerne, who had recently patriot Paracelsus, he used metallic with Gideon de Laune, a Huguenot medicines and was on this account read refugee, helped to found the Society of out of the Paris faculty, but not out of Apothecaries, was consulted as to the the favour of Henri IV. Visiting Eng- oil. His prescription was used with one lishmen of the Court in due time made minor addition at the coronation of Ed- his reputation known in London, so * Professor of the History of Medicine at Queen’s University, Kingston. that when Henri was assassinated, King ward VII. Orange and jasmine Howers court of James I in 1621, when Mayerne are infused in oil of sesame; to this are was forty-eight years of age, a period added essential oils of roses and cinna- which well suits the rendering of the mon, benzoin, ambergris, civet, musk, and spirits of rosemary. It has a rich perfume and a clear amber colour, and it keeps indefinitely. It is the custom to leave one ounce in the ampulla at each coronation, and at the next to fill it up to the full three ounces. So each is sym- bolically linked to each. Mayerne’s prestige as a physician lived after him. In 1690 a committee of the Royal College compiled a practice of medicine out of his case records. This was copied at Augsburg in 1691, at Geneva in 1692, and at Lyon in 1693. In 1700, Dr. George Browne of London published a large folio of Mayerne’s case records and prescriptions which was re- issued in 1701 and 1703. Portr aits in Oil 1. In the Leicester gallery at Knole, the seat of Lord Sackville, near Seven- oaks, Kent, hangs a large three-quarter personality in the Knole portrait. The length seated portrait which, in 1846, two men must have become familiar was exhibited7 at the British Institution friends about the court, and Mayerne’s as a portrait of Mayerne by William search8 for pigments would be a special Dobson. It was then the property of reason for intimacy. Instances of con- Lady Amherst. fusion in the attribution of portraits by Dobson’s acknowledged portraits Van Dyck and Dobson, where these were painted within the period 1638 to overlap in date, have occurred in several 1646, when Mayerne would have been instances. Such a problem is well sixty-five years old or more. The Knole handled in Booth Tarkington’s recent portrait shows us a virile personality in tale “Rumbin Galleries.’’ A supposed his early maturity, with a plentiful head Dobson in Runibin’s possession is pro- of hair becoming streaked with grey. nounced by a more experienced judge The imperial beard is grey, but the neat to be a Van Dyck, and is valued by him moustache with up-brushed points is at $22,000, a sum which sets Rumbin dark. The Rubens portraits of 1629-30 more firmly on his feet as an art dealer. show a much older man of fifty-seven This talc suggested to the writer that years, completely white-haired and the Knole portrait might be an early much less concerned as to his grooming. example of Van Dyck’s work in Eng- A portrait of Mayerne by Dobson land. A weighty authority, whose name should have shown a still older subject. I am not authorised to mention, has ex- Dobson was the discovery and pupil pressed in correspondence the opinion of Anton Van Dyck, who came to the that it is not impossible that this is the case. He had often seen the picture at low physicians that the king could not Knole, he felt sure that it was not by bear the idea of medication with human Dobson, but had not been convinced as skull and that in his case they must use to its origin, nor is he now. The subject the skull of an ox.11 James was inordi- nately fond of sweet Spanish wines and suffered much from gout. 2. Peter Paul Rubens came to Lon- don as ambassador for the Spanish Netherlands in 1629 and stayed a year. He fell in love with the English country- side and praised the art treasures col- lected in the homes of royalty and nobility. In the National Portrait Gallery there is a three-quarter length seated portrait of Mayerne by Rubens. A statue of Aes- culapius with club and circling serpent stands in the right background, and on the left a seascape of a ship entering safe harbour. The second earl of Arundel was its first owner, then Dr. Richard Mead. At the sale of his collections in 1754 it brought the highest price of all the portraits—one hundred and fifteen pounds, ten shillings.12 Lord Bess- borough was the next owner, then Lord Lansdowne, and lastly Cleveland is obviously a medical person, and his House. It was bought for the Gallety bulky corporation corresponds with in 1912. that displayed in acknowledged por- 2a. John Simon (1675-1751) a Nor- traits of Mayerne. A human skull rests man-French Huguenot refugee, copied upon the right knee, the right hand it in a mezzotint engraving which ren- holds a probe pointing to a trephine ders some elements of the background opening over the central frontal emi- more perceptible. The legend gives nence. There are several prescriptions Mayerne’s birth and death dates, a year in Mayerne’s case records in which too early in each case. The rest of it scrapings of unburied human skull are states that the original is the work of included. Such objects were on sale for Rubens and that it was studied in the eleven shillings and upwards according collection of Dr. Richard Mead. to size. He considered it a “specific”9 in 3. In 1870, M. Bordier of Geneva epilepsy and useful in gout.10 Perhaps found among the Mayerne manuscripts the circle of bone over the frontal emi- in the British Museum a draft of a let- nence may have seemed to the groping ter from the doctor to Rubens, thank- credulity of those days the most likely ing him for a portrait of himself which part to possess mystic potency. had arrived from Antwerp. The date of In a memorandum of remedies which the letter is March 25, 1631. The opin- he had found useful in the treatment of ion of several experts is that this portrait his royal master, Mayerne tells his fel- is not from the hand of Rubens. It may have come from his atelier, the work of and the ship entering a safe harbour— subordinates. It conveys a very different echoes of the Mead portrait—and by view ol the personality of our subject. the bizarre scroll with the legend “Haec Mayerne’s brilliant parts and long ex- non sine Numine,” which we might perience of primacy in his profession paraphrase, “All this comes not without may have fostered traces at least of ex- divine assistance.’’ travagant self-assertion and flamboyance Mayerne’s letter is profuse in thanks which the keen eye of Rubens could not and in deprecation of the flattering sug- fail to observe. Did he venture to sug- gestions referred to.