Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, Baron Aulbone of France, was born at
Geneva in 1573, of a Calvinistic family and studied for the medical
profession first at Heidelberg and afterwards at Montpellier. Moving
to Paris he acquired popularity as a lecturer on anatomy to surgeons,
and on pharmacy to apothecaries. His inclination towards chemical
remedies brought him to the notice of Rivierus, the first physician to
Henri IV, and he was appointed one of the king’s physicians. But his
medical heterodoxy offended the faculty, and his Protestantism raised
enemies for him at court. The king, who valued Turquet, did his best
to persuade him to conform to the Church of Rome as he himself had
done, and to moderate the rancour of his professional foes. But he was
unsuccessful in both efforts. Still Henri tried to keep him, ignoring
his heresies, and perhaps rather sympathising with them. But the queen,
Marie de Medici, insisted on Turquet’s dismissal, and the Faculty
of Paris was no whit behind the queen in intolerance. Coupling him
with a quack named Pierre Pena, a foreigner then practising medicine
illicitly at Paris, they issued a decree forbidding all physicians who
acknowledged their control to consult with De Turquer, and exhorting
practitioners of all nations to avoid him and all similar pests, and to
persevere in the doctrines of Hippocrates and Galen.
Turquet de Mayerne came to England evidently with a high reputation,
for he was soon appointed first physician to the king (James I) and
queen, and held the same position under Charles I and Charles II. He
seems to have kept in retirement during the Commonwealth, though in
1628 it appears from his manuscript records (“Ephemerides Anglicæ,”
he called them) that he was consulted by a “Mons. Cromwell” whom he
describes as “Valde melancholicus.” He died at Chelsea in 1655 at the
age of 82. It was in England that he used the name of Mayerne.
De Mayerne exercised a considerable influence on English pharmacy. The
Society of Apothecaries owed to him their separate incorporation, and
the first London Pharmacopœia was compiled and authorised probably to
some extent at his instigation. He certainly wrote the preface to it.
Paris quotes him as prescribing among absurd and disgusting remedies
“the secundines of a woman in her first labour of a male child, the
bowels of a mole cut open alive, and the mummy made of the lungs of a
man who had died a violent death.” But such remedies were common to
all practitioners in England and France at the time. The principal
ingredient in a gout powder which he composed was the raspings of an
unburied human skull. He devised an ointment for hypochondria which was
called the Balsam of Bats. It contained adders, bats, sucking whelps,
earthworms, hog’s grease, marrow of a stag, and the thigh bone of an
ox. On the other hand, Mayerne is credited with the introduction of
calomel and black wash into medical practice.