Popular Errors
Laurent Joubert was an important figure in the medical world of the French Renaissance. Born in 1529, he became a doctor at age 29 and shortly thereafter was appointed personal physician to Catherine de Medici and later became physician to three French monarchs. Joubert was an educator as well as a physician, and he wrote several works of medical literature, including his most controversial work, Erreurs populaires. While the work focuses on popular misconceptions concerning medicine and physicians in France in the 1500s, it also represents a wealth of information on the social, economic, political, and religious worldviews that framed and thus supported the development and conduct of medical science.
Joubert's criticism is grounded in . . . Opposition to such practitioners of empirical knowledge as barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, and laymen who were would-be physicians or charlatans. . . . A complete index of proper names, medica-ments, and pathological terms makes the work accessible to readers in many fields.'
—Medical Book News
Orthodox medicine in pre-modern times seems to have had all too little to offer other than a bedside manner and thumping doses of purgatives. The point emerges clearly from Gregory de Rocher's translationof Laurent Joubert's Popular Errors, of 1578, a 'frantic effort,' writes de Rocher, 'at parrying the fierce blows to the power and prestige of physicians dealt by practical medicine.''
—London Review of Books
Gregory David de Rocher is Professor of Romance Languages and Classics, The University of Alabama
