Dr. Jean Paul Marat

Abstract

IN a recent paper (Hippocrate, 7, 379; 1939) Dr. Henri Candiani protests against the unjust and cruel treatment which Marat has received not only from scurrilous pamphleteers but also from reputable historians such as Michelet, Taine and Carlyle. While not attempting to refute all the legends and calumnies concerning the “Friend of the People”, Dr. Candiani confines himself to the scientific and medical aspects of his here. So far from being a charlatan or merely a horse-leech, as Carlyle called him, he was a properly qualified medical man of St. Andrews who, during his residence in London, had a good practice in Soho when that district was a fashionable quarter. His “Essay on Man” (1775), more than half of which is devoted to anatomy, is a philosophical and psychological work, in which he has been recognized as the precursor of Cabanis, Broussais and Gall. In his “Essay on Gleets”, published the same year, he criticized certain errors of treatment current at the time, including the use of hard and irritating bougies, for which he substituted softer instruments. In 1776 he made an important contribution to ophthalmology in his “Enquiry into a Singular Disease of the Eyes”, in which, as Prof. True of Montpellier has shown, he gave a description of astigmatism which preceded the classical account of Thomas Young by more than twenty years. But it was as a pioneer in electrotherapy, on which he wrote in 1782 and 1783, that Marat chiefly deserves mention in the history of medicine. According to Dr. W. G. Turrell of Oxford, his work on this subject was on far more scientific lines than the writings of any of his predecessors or even than the publications of many of his successors. In conclusion, Dr. Candiani describes Marat as a conscientious experimenter, resolutely hostile to absurd theories or hasty generalizations.