opinions as there are heads. If by chance they should agree upon the purpose to be effected, they will differ concerning the details. One will propose, for example, in the treatment of a tumor, to make it ripen, while another, who had intended to prescribe the same, will say althea and a third ursine, and so on with the others, if there are a thousand of them; then all these drugs will be mixed in the same medicine, although mallows alone would have been the best.
An anecdote is related by Mondeville in illustration of the desire that prevailed in those days to appear to be doing something. During a consultation, when a number of the best doctors in Paris had just formulated a prescription for a sirup, a belated colleague came in. After carefully examining the prescription, he added a berry. On the others expressing surprise, he exclaimed: "Mutton-heads and oxen! why are you looking at me so? How could I conscientiously take my part of the fees if I did not put something in the sirup?"
If the consultants do not dispute over some definite object, they will dispute from jealousy or hatred; and the instant one of them suggests something reasonable and conformable to experience, the others, even though it was what each one of them himself would have recommended if he had been alone, rise one after the other and agree in declaring the contrary of what was proposed.
Mondeville thus describes consultations under two different aspects. The first picture presents the typical, orderly consultation; the second exhibits the daily strifes and rivalries, of which he collects several various types in a few lines. Viewed in this light, the men of the fourteenth century were much like those who followed them, except that they were more brutal and less careful of delicate forms.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.
