Philbert Guybert - Toutes les Œuvres Charitables - 1648

This report, written in two parts, recounts the charitable works of Philibert Guybert, which were reprinted at least sixty times between 1623 and 1679 – a remarkably high figure for that period. The charitable Physician (1623) was followed by other works such as The Price and Value of Medicines (1625), The Charitable Apothecary (1625), The Manner of Embalming the Dead (1627), etc. To illustrate the methods then used at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, Guybert’s works were repeatedly compiled under the title Euvres charitables de Philibert Guybert, up to the reference edition of 1633, where other authors added further works. Guybert’s aim was to help people, particularly the poor, to treat themselves by making their own remedies—i.e., to resist privilege as well as the apothecaries’ profit motive and their corrupt methods. The first part recalls the period between 1623 and 1629, concerning Guybert’s early works and the controversy between physicians and apothecaries. The second part begins by recounting the history of the reference edition, in 1633, published a few months before Guybert’s death. Gui Patin, the famous Parisian physician, played an important role in this edition: he wrote a Treatise on the Preservation of Health, as well as numerous annotations on Nicolas Ellain’s Avis sur la peste—in which Patin expresses his disapproval of certain remedies such as théria, mithridate, arsenic, pearls, bezoars, etc.—and also what he thought of Galen’s Treatise on Bleeding (with his approval of both bleeding and Galen!). The author then recalls posthumous editions, some of them clandestine, and also mentions the Latin and English editions (the work of the officious Medicis and Le Médecin charitable respectively). The nature of Guybert’s works, as well as various similar events (such as the 1647 lawsuit between Patin and the apothecaries), illustrate the importance of the conflicts between Parisian apothecaries and the physicians of the time.