stouter Englishman than myself with the cruelty of his operation. However, I visited them all in their beds and found them more amazed than in pain."

The door of the Hôtel Dieu had not opened willingly, but the friendly canon had given Frère Jacques a letter to De Harley, first President of the Parliament, and only by command of the latter did Mery and the other surgeons admit Frère Jacques. Mery was honest enough to draw up a report full of warm praise, but was afterwards influenced by the jealousy of his angry confrères to return to the old method and to injure Jacques by dwelling on his failures and condemning impudently the operation he had at first so heartily approved.

Frère Jacques' failures were due to a lack of fuller knowledge of anatomy and not to the method used, but failures there were and the lithotomists triumphantly put him to severer tests day by day and then harangued on the incapacity of the operator. De Harley grew cold towards his protégé, and Jacques, who sought neither money nor fame but believing his skill to be "a gift of God" and therefore to be used, went to the Court at Fontainbleau and wrote to Duchesne, first physician to the royal princes. This doctor received him cordially and introduced him to Fagon and Felix, physician and surgeon to Louis XIV.

"This is a man who must not be neglected," said Louis, when the three learned men had been impressed by six operations by Frère Jacques. He was therefore lodged and maintained at the King's expense and returned with the Court to Paris where again he successfully operated.

De Harley saw his mistake and required a second report from the Hôtel Dieu, to the consternation of the surgeons. Had this miserable quack in monkish garb appeared again to trouble them? Were they, the great lithotomists, to become his pupils? All Paris was interested. On the 7th of April, 1698, magistrates, physicians and surgeons gathered in the Archbishop's palace. Mery opened the debate by some insipid compliments and ended. with the impeachment of an operation of which he had once. openly, and still secretly, acknowledged the merits. But his very violence betrayed his partisanship and induced the saner and larger-minded men present to vote in favor of Jacques operating at the Hôtel Dieu.

His enemies were defeated but not silenced; their jealous eyes watched him, their malicious tongues did him much harm. The

doors of the hospital where he operated were crowded and sentries were required to keep back the throng of spectators.

Frère Jacqus cut in the same way at La Charité, and Marechal, the best lithotomist in Paris, harangued against him before the Governors who answered that they preferred to await results.

Now came disaster for Jacques and unwise but temporary wrath. Out of sixty-two patients, twenty-five died, a proportion small compared with former mortality but enough to discredit Jacques. Weary and disheartened, he retorted that the monks at La Charité had by intentionally careless after-care allowed his patients to die. But they died as well in the Hôtel Dieu, and Jacques left Paris. We find the Dutch newspapers the next year announcing him as lithotomist to the King of Holland, while the methods of this sorely tried and much-abused operator were adopted by Marechal in Paris, Rau in Holland, and later by Cheselden in England. Rau had the bad taste to adopt Jacques' method and decry its originator. He pretended so well that he only opened the body of the bladder without touching its orifice or its neck that he considerably retarded research for methods and led surgeons to do an operation which in their hands had often fatal consequences. Even the celebrated Albinus, who had seen him cut many times, was deceived; so much so, that after Rau's death he gave such a description of operating that he made many lateral methods seem wrong, for it is now obviously impossible in using the catheter to make the incision as far as Albinus imagined Rau did. The latter cut as Frère Jacques had done, that is, dividing the prostate and the neck of the bladder according to the method of Celsus. ("Observations Introchirurgiques." Joseph Covillard, 1639.)

Both Holland and Germany welcomed Jacques, and at Amsterdam Heister tells us that "Guerell, chief physician to the hospital, with several other persons of distinction, had a meeting with Jacques at the house of a nobleman (Verdun) and conversed with him and viewed his instruments; his catheter was then without a groove and his first operation was upon a lad, waiter at an inn. At this operation were assembled, by order of the Senate, the chief physician of the hospital and city, and Frère Jacques performed his operation before them with so much sleight and dexterity and in so short a time that it raised

FRÈRE JACQUES PERFORMING HIS OPERATION FOR LITHOTOMY.

"Here the Hermit shows to the learned surgeons, all

The doctors and the other scientific men

His noble secret; his skilful touch in cutting;

His firm, his steadfast hand; his principle and technique.
The most of them, amazed, call him a Phoenix bird;

But those who, silent, stand in awe, praise him the most."