Complete Works, Volume I

Therefore, at the beginning of autumn in the following year, he finally fell into a fatal illness; and the same remedies were applied by those same most celebrated physicians of Paris. Nor indeed were the authorities of Galen and Hippocrates lacking to these most learned men, to whom the restoration of their friend was undoubtedly a matter of great concern; but that trite saying was proved by most sad experience:

Sometimes the malady is stronger than learned art.

When, after nine repeated bloodlettings, the excellent man felt his strength—alas!—too greatly diminished, and the celebrated physicians and friends were present, he hesitantly proposed (lest he seem to put his sickle into another man’s harvest) whether it might be wise to abstain from phlebotomy, which he judged himself unequal to enduring. The eldest of the physicians was sitting by the sick man, and after consulting the pulse and attending to other signs, he was already inclined, along with one of his colleagues, to spare the blood; when I know not what other man, walking through the room with a great stride, stubbornly argued for the contrary, and drew his colleagues back into his own opinion, as if by right of return. Nor did GASSENDI refuse, for he did not value the use of life so highly at that age, already so weakened that there could hardly be hope of restoring his good health in full—without which one ought not to say that someone lives, so much as that he painfully draws breath amidst punishments and pains; reflecting indeed within himself that nothing happens without the Divine Will, he immediately decided to commit himself to Divine Providence, which indeed has its appointed limits, while we strive in vain to delay the final necessity of dying. Nor was that the last phlebotomy, but four others followed, one of which POTIER, with GASSENDI’S knowledge, had wished to evade; as if it had already been performed before the arrival of the physician who had ordered it, that dutiful lie, detected I know not how, was of no benefit, except that this faithful secretary was severely rebuked, and perhaps a larger quantity of the fluid was drawn off by the summoned surgeon. These things I recount for the sake of history, or of truth, and not indeed to provoke anyone or to blame the medical practice of any man: For Socrates is a friend, Plato is a friend, but truth is a greater friend. If there was anything truly learned and of great name among the physicians of Paris, all of it was present for the healing of GASSENDI; nor would those most excellent men have proceeded by any other method toward the goal of medicine in curing their own kin, or even Princes suffering from a similar disease. Thus the physicians are not at all to blame on account of the phlebotomy performed a little too frequently, as PIERRE BOREL wished to suggest when, in his Third Century of Physico-Medical or Medico-Physical Observations, Observation XI, he writes: I could here [mention] the man's...