In the seventeenth century, medicine was a highly prestigious field. Doctors were leading thinkers, pillars of the university, great botanists and respected chemists, held in high regard despite the fact that their treatments were largely ineffective, limited mostly to bleeding patients and administering purgative concoctions.
Surgeons, on the other hand, belonged to the professional guild of barbers. The year marked a turning point. Surgery reached its institutional height during the reign of Louis XV, with the establishment of the Royal Academy of Surgeons in The operation was performed at 8am on 18 November in the royal bedchamber at Versailles, shrouded in the utmost secrecy. The operation proved to be a great success, and the king recovered rapidly.
Fistula even became something of a fashionable condition at court. La Peyronie was a surgeon famed for his extraordinary dexterity. Kings and princes made an invaluable contribution to the advancement of science by putting their sacred bodies and royal blood at the mercy of their doctors. In doing so they served as examples and pioneers: the inoculation of the royal princes against smallpox after the death of Louis XV is a case in point.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was still no known cure for smallpox, a highly contagious and potentially fatal disease: the pox was essentially untreatable. A forerunner to the modern science of vaccination, inoculation consisted of infecting a healthy patient with a controlled dose of pox. This method, originating in the Ottoman Empire, began to make inroads into Western Europe in the eighteenth century. In France, inoculation was the subject of a lively controversy.
In the duke requested permission from the king, his cousin, to have his family inoculated at the Palais Royal in Paris. It would take almost twenty years for the reigning monarch to be convinced of the merits of inoculation, by which time Louis XV had died of smallpox and the young Louis XVI had ascended to the throne with Marie-Antoinette as his queen.
