De structura renum was an anatomico-physiological description of the kidneys based on dissections using colouring techniques which were completely new for the period: by injecting a black liquid – wine spirits mixed with Indian ink – into the arteria emulgens (renal artery), Rigaud de Dinteville had observed the whole ramified system changing colour, from the canaliculi, which he called ductae renum, to what he called the glandulae renales. These discoveries, made independently of the work being done in the same period by Lorenzo Bellini in Florence, Marcello Malpighi in Bologna, and Frederyk Ruysch at Leiden, but similarly prefiguring the theory of glomerulus as the basis of renal function, were accompanied by an explanation of the secreting mechanisms based on the presence of humours attracted or repelled by the organs according to the organism’s need for assimilation or elimination. A sharp and sometimes even violent dispute set this Galenist theory of “vital forces” against the harmful doctrines of “atomist” and “materialist” inspiration as propounded by someone called Bombastinus, a pseudonym under which the present-day Dinteville eventually identified a Burgundian doctor of more or less alchemical persuasion who was also a supporter of Paracelsius, by the name of Lazare Meyssonier. The reasons for these polemics were far from clear to this twentieth-century reader, who could imagine only very roughly what Galen’s theories had stood for, and to whom terms like “atomist” and “materialist” certainly did not mean what they had meant to his distant ancestor. Nonetheless Dinteville was excited by his discovery, which aroused his imagination and awoke his dormant, secret vocation for research. And so he decided to compile a critical edition of this text which,even if it contained nothing of truly major importance, provided an excellent example of medical thought as it was at the dawn of modern times.
On the advice of one of his former teachers, Dinteville submitted his project to Professor LeBran-Chastel, a consultant at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, Member of the Academy of Medicine, Member of the Medical Association Board, and a member of the editorial boards of several internationally known reviews. Alongside his activities as a clinician and as a teacher, Professor LeBran-Chastel was keenly interested in the history of science, but he received Dinteville with friendliness mixed with scepticism: he did not know the De structura renum, but he doubted whether its resuscitation held any real interest: everything from Galen to Vesalius, from Barthélemy Eustache to Bowman had been published, translated, and annotated at length, and in 1901, Paolo Ceneri, a librarian at the Medical Faculty at Bologna, where Malpighi’s manuscripts were kept, had even published a four-hundred-page bibliography dealing solely with the theoretical problems of uropoïesis and uroscopy. Of course, it was still possible, as Dinteville’s experience showed, to come across previously unpublished texts, and of course one could imagine making advances in our understanding of ancient medical theories, correcting the often rather rigid assertions of nineteenth-century epistemologists who, with the supreme confidence born of scientific positivism, had seen value in experimental approaches alone and had swept aside everything else which seemed, to them, irrational. But a project of that sort was a long-term undertaking, a thankless, difficult job fraught with traps, and the professor wondered whether the young practitioner, unfamiliar as he was with the archaising jargon of the older medical writers or with the strange aberrations their commentators had occasionally ascribed to them, would be able to deal with it successfully. Nonetheless, he promised to give him his help, provided a few letters of introduction to foreign colleagues, and offered to read his results before supporting their publication, if appropriate.
* * *
Dinteville was encouraged by this initial interview and set to work, spending evenings, Saturdays, and Sundays on research and using even the shortest breaks he could take without neglecting his patients too much for trips to one foreign library or another, not just to Bologna, where he quickly discovered that more than half the entries in Paolo Ceneri’s bibliography were erroneous, but also to Bodley at Oxford, to Aarhus, to Salamanca, to Prague, Dresden, Basel, etc. He kept Professor LeBran-Chastel informed of the progress of his investigations at regular intervals, and, at much longer intervals, the professor responded with laconic notes which seemed to express continuing doubts about the interest of what he called Dinteville’s “little finds”. But the young doctor was not to be discouraged for all that: over and above the groping complexity of his research, each one of his minute discoveries – an implausible vestige here, a doubtful reference there, ambiguous evidence everywhere – seemed to him to be destined to fit into a project that was unique, global, and almost grandiose; and his enthusiasm was renewed every time he started on unearthings, as he hunted at random through shelves collapsing under vellum bindings, following the alphabetical order of vanished alphabets, up and down halls, stairs, bridges cluttered with newspapers tied up in string, archive boxes, and bundles of documents almost completely eaten away by worms.
It took him four years to complete his work: a manuscript of over three hundred sides, of which the edition and translation of the De structura renum proper took up only sixty; the rest of the work consisted of critical material, including 33 pages of notes and variants, sixty pages of bibliography, one-third of which listed errata to the Ceneri, and an introduction of nearly one hundred and fifty pages in which Dinteville recounted, at an almost spanking pace, the story of the long struggle between Galen and Asclepiades, showing how the doctor of Pergamos had misrepresented, in order to ridicule them, the atomist theories which Asclepiades had brought to Rome three centuries before and which his followers, the ones called “Methodists”, had followed perhaps too pedantically; but in stigmatising the mechanistic and sophist underpinning of this school of thought, in the name of experimentation and the sacrosanct principle of “natural forces’’, Galen had in fact inaugurated a causalistic, diachronic, and homogenist tradition, all the faults of which reared their heads again in the classical age of physiology and medicine, and which had ended up functioning, in a way exactly analogous to Freudian repression, as a censorship device. Using a framework of formal oppositions such as organic/organistic, sympathetic/empathetic, humours/fluids, hierarchy/structure, etc., Dinteville illuminated the subtlety and pertinence of Asclepiades’ notions, and of Eresistrates’ and Lycos of Macedon’s before him, showed their relationship to the main trends of Indo-Arabic medical thought, stressed their connections with Jewish mysticism, hermeticism, and alchemy, and finally demonstrated how official medicine had systematically repressed diffusion of these ideas until men like Goldstein, Grodeck, and King Dri had managed to get a hearing and, by bringing to light the subterranean current which had continuously flowed through the world of science from Paracelsius to Fourier, had raised far-reaching doubts about the very foundations of medical physiology and semiology.
Barely had the typist (brought over specially from Toulouse) finished typing this difficult text sprouting with cross-references, footnotes, and Greek characters, than Dinteville mailed a copy to LeBran-Chastel; the professor sent it back one month after: he had studied the doctor’s work with care, without partiality and without malice, and his conclusion was firmly negative: to be sure, the editing of Rigaud de Dinteville’s text had been done with a thoroughness which honoured his descendant, but the treatise of the surgeon ordinary of the Princess Palatine added nothing very new in comparison to Eustache’s Tractatio de renibus, Lorenzo Bellini’s De structura et usu renum, Etienne Blancard’s De natura renum, and Malpighi’s De renibus, and did not seem to merit separate publication; the critical material bore witness to the young researcher’s immaturity: he had tried too hard, and had succeeded only in overloading his text to an excessive degree; the errata on Ceneri were quite irrelevant to the issue, and the author would have done better to check his own notes and references (followed by a list of fifteen errors or omissions which LeBran-Chastel had had the kindness to note down: for instance, Dinteville had written J. Clin. Invest, instead of J. clin. Invest, in reference No. 10 [Möller, McIntos
h & van Slyke], and had cited the article by H. Wirz in Mod. Prob. Pädiat. 6, 86, 1960, without referring to the prior study by Wirz, Hargitay & Kuhn published in Helv. physiol. pharmacol. Acta 9,196,1951); as for the historico-philosophical introduction, the professor preferred to leave it to Dinteville’s sole responsibility, and for his own part refused to take any action whatsoever which might lead to its publication.
Dinteville was ready for anything except a reaction of this kind. Though convinced of the pertinence of his own research, he did not dare question the intellectual honesty or the competence of Professor LeBran-Chastel. After several weeks of dithering, he decided he ought not to give way to the hostile views of a man who, after all, was not his boss, and that he should try to have his manuscript published by his own efforts; he corrected the trivial errors in it and sent it to several specialist journals. They all turned him down, and Dinteville was obliged to give up trying to publish his work, abandoning by the same token all his research ambitions.
The excessive interest he had taken in his investigation, to the detriment of his daily work as a medical practitioner, had done him considerable harm. Two family doctors had set up in Lavaur after him and, over the months and years, had filched nearly all his patients. With no support, abandoned, disgusted, Dinteville finally gave up his practice and came to settle in Paris, determined to be only a local doctor whose harmless dreams would no more offend the prestigious but fearsome world of scholarship and learning, but would be confined instead to the domestic pleasures of making music and good food.
Over the following years, Professor LeBran-Chastel, Member of the Academy of Medicine, published in succession:
– an article on the life and work of Rigaud de Dinteville (A French Urologist at the Court of Louis XIV: Rigaud de Dinteville, Arch. Intern. Hist. Sci. 11, 343,1962);
– a critical edition of the De structura renum, with a facsimile reproduction, translation, notes, and glossary (S. Karger, Basel, 1963);
– a critical supplement to Ceneri’s Bibliografica urologica (Int. Z. ƒ Urol. Suppl. 9,1964); and lastly
– an epistemological article entitled “A sketch history of renal theories from Asclepiades to William Bowman”, published in Aktuelle Probleme aus der Geschichte der Medizin (Basel, 1966), a revised version of his opening report to the XIXth International Congress on the History of Medicine (Basel, 1964), which raised a considerable stir.
The critical edition of the De structura and the supplement to the Ceneri bibliography were purely and simply copied down to the last comma from Dinteville’s manuscript. The other two pieces, which were also lifted directly and watered down by various rhetorical and precautionary insertions, cited the good doctor only once, in the very small print of a footnote where Professor LeBran-Chastel thanked “Dr Bernard Dinteville for having been so kind as to communicate his ancestor’s work to [him]”.
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
Hutting, 4
HUTTING HAS NOT used his great studio for a long time now, as he prefers the intimacy of the smaller room he had converted on the gallery level for painting his portraits and has acquired the habit of working at his other pieces, according to their genre, in one or another of his other studios: large-scale canvases at Gattières, in the hills behind Nice, monumental sculptures in the Dordogne, drawings and prints in New York.
All the same, his Paris salon was for many years a hub of intense artistic activity. That is where Hutting’s famous “Tuesday Group” gathered between ’55 and ’60, where artists and artistes as diverse as the poster-designer Félicien Kohn, the Belgian baritone Léo van Derckx, the Italian Martiboni, the Spanish “verbalist” Tortosa, the photographer Arpad Sarafian, and the saxophonist Estelle Thierarch’ first made their names, and whose influence on some of the major trends in contemporary art has by no means run its full course yet.
It was not Hutting who first had the idea of the Tuesdays, but his Canadian friend Grillner, who had successfully organised similar events at Winnipeg directly after the end of the Second World War. The principle of such gatherings was to bring creators together in free confrontation and see how they would influence each other. Thus on the first of these “Tuesdays” Grillner and Hutting took turns every three minutes at painting the same canvas, as if they were playing each other at chess, before an audience of fifteen or so attentive onlookers. But the recipe for the sessions soon became much more sophisticated, and artists working in quite different fields were brought in: a painter painted whilst a jazz musician improvised, or a poet, a musician, and a dancer would each give his own interpretation in his own idiom of a work presented to them by a sculptor or a dress-designer.
The first sessions were well-behaved, conscientious, and very slightly boring. Then, with the arrival of Vladislav the painter, they took a much livelier turn.
Vladislav was a painter who had had his hour of glory at the end of the nineteen thirties. The first time he came to one of Hutting’s “Tuesdays” he was dressed as a muzhik. On his head he wore a kind of scarlet bonnet made of very fine cloth, with a fur rim all around, except in the front, where a small gap of a few inches revealed a lightly embroidered sky-blue background; and he was smoking Turkish tobacco-pipes with a flexible tube of morocco leather and gold wire, mounted at its end with black ebony tipp’d with silver. He began by telling how on a stormy day in Brittany he had practised necrophilia and how he could only paint if his feet were bare and if he had a handkerchief soaked in absinthe to sniff and how after summer rain in the country he would sit in tepid mud to get back in touch with Mother Nature and how he ate raw meat macerated in the Magyar manner which gave it incomparable savour. Then he spread a great roll of blank canvas on the floor, hurriedly put in a score of nails to hold it flat, and invited the gathering to trample on it all together. The result, whose indeterminate shades of grey were somewhat reminiscent of the “diffuse greys” of Laurence Hapi’s last period, was immediately baptised Man with Sole Out. Bedazzled, all present decided Vladislav would be henceforth the gatherings’ appointed master of ceremonies, and all left with the certain feeling that they had helped to give birth to a masterpiece.
The following Tuesday it did indeed seem that Vladislav had done things properly. He had rounded up everyone who was anyone in Paris, and there were more than one hundred and fifty of them cramming the studio. A huge canvas had been stapled to the three walls of the big room (the fourth wall was formed by a tall glass screen), and several dozen buckets, with decorators’ paint brushes soaking in them, were arranged in the centre of the room. At Vladislav’s command, the guests lined up along the glass screen and, at a signal he gave, rushed to the paint pots, grabbed the brushes, and hurried to daub their contents as fast as they could onto the canvas. The resulting work was considered interesting, but it did not really capture the unanimous support of its scratch creators, and despite his continuous efforts, week after week, to demonstrate his inventiveness, Vladislav’s vogue was short-lived.
In the ensuing months his place was taken by a child prodigy, a lad of twelve or so, who looked like a fashion plate, with curly hair, big lace ruffs, and black velvet waistcoats with mother-of-pearl buttons. He improvised “metaphysical poems” whose titles alone took his listeners’ breath away:
Evaluation of the situation
Enumeration of things and beings lost on the way
Sort of summing up
Clip clop horses unsaddled grazing in the dark
Red glow of campfire under the starry sky
But alas one day it was realised that it was his mother who composed – or, more often, copied – these poems, which she forced her son to learn by heart.
Then came a mystical labourer; a striptease star; a tie-seller; a sculptor describing himself as neo-renascent who took several months to extract a work entitled Chimaera from a lump of marble (a few weeks later a worrying crack appeared in the ceiling of the flat below, and Hutting had to have it repaired and to replace his own woodblock floor); the director of an a
rt review, a follower of Christo who wrapped small live animals in nylon sachets; a popular café singer who called everyone “Handsome”; a chap who ran a talent-spotting show on radio, a thickset lad with a houndstooth waistcoat, kiss curls, chunky rings, and novelty charms, who did impressions, using his voice and his body and with intonations and movements worthy of a wrestling commentator, of the dancers and musicians on his show; an advertising executive into yoga who tried in vain for three weeks to initiate the other guests into his art by making them do the lotus position in the centre of the great studio; the proprietress of a pizzeria, a silky-voiced Italian, who sang Verdi arias with absolute poise whilst improvising sublimely scrumptious spaghetti dishes; and the ex-director of a minor zoo who had trained fox terriers to jump through hoops backwards and ducks to run rings, and who set up in the studio with a juggling walrus which ate horrifying quantities of fish.