INTRODUCTION: THE MAN

The eponymous hero of this chapter is unlikely to be a familiar figure to many historians of medicine of the post-Cartesian era. This is scarcely surprising for from the vantage point of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Philippe Hecquet (1661–1737) was just another Paris physician, indistinguishable from the large majority of the three hundred or so medical men who legally or illegally practised their craft in the French capital at the turn of the eighteenth century. Certainly, there were a number of Paris doctors at this time whose shades have been duly honoured in the medical pantheon, such as the botanist J.P. de Tournefort (1656–1708). Hecquet, however, was decidedly not of their stamp. Unlike his more prestigious colleagues, Hecquet's primary concern was with healing the sick. He was totally uninterested in helping push back the frontiers of medical knowledge by personally torturing nature to reveal her secrets. Significantly, he never presented an account of any experimental work to a learned society which he himself had performed; indeed, there is no evidence that he ever did any research.

Nevertheless, in the early eighteenth century the mention of Hecquet's name to a fellow physician, not just in Paris but in virtually any European city, would have elicited an immediate electric response. To some, like the Scot Thomas Bower, professor of mathematics at the university of Aberdeen, Hecquet was the principal physician of the French capital.