Moliere's play, The Imaginary Invalid Moliere

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Lysetta.  What will you do, sir, with four physicians?  Is not one enough to kill any one person?

Sganarel.  Hold your tongue.  Four heads are better than one.

Lysetta.  Cannot your daughter die well enough without the assistance of these gentlemen?

Sganarel  Do you think people die through having physicians?

Lysetta.  Undoubtedly; and I knew a man who maintained - and proved it, too, by excellent reasons - that we should never say, “Such a one has died of a fever, or a from an inflammation of the lungs,” but “Such a one has died of four doctors and two apothecaries.”

Sganarel.  Hush!  Do not offend these gentlemen.

Lysetta.  Upon my word, sir, our cat had a narrow escape from a leap he took a little while ago, from the top of the house into the street; he was three days without eating, and unable to move head or paw; but it is  very lucky that there are no cat-doctors, else it would have been all over with him, for they would have purged and bled him.

Sganarel.  Will you hold your tongue, I say?  What impertinence is this!  Here they come.

Lysetta.  Take care; you are going to be finely edified.  They will tell you in Latin that your daughter is ill.

Molière (1622-1673) Love is the  Best Doctor; tr. H. Van Laun, The Dramatic Works of Molière, vol III (Edinburgh, 1866), p. 211.

[Molière’s] four doctors were caricatured from real characters well known in Paris at the time - Guy Patin says they were Guénaut, Brayer, Des Fougerais, and Valot.  They attended the fatal illness of Cardinal Mazarin in 1661, wrangled, and did not agree as to the cause of his trouble...  At a later time when Guénaut was one day entangled in a crowd of vehicles in the street, a cart driver shouted “Let the Doctor go ahead.  He’s the one who did us the service to rid us of the Cardinal.”

Logan Clendening, Source Book of Medical History (Dover, 1942) pp. 221-222

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