I

Dedication

This is dedicated to Auguste Borget by his friend De Balzac

Bianchon, a physician to whom science owes a fine system of

theoretical physiology, and who, while still young, made himself

a celebrity in the medical school of Paris, that central luminary

to which European doctors do homage, practised surgery for a long

time before he took up medicine. His earliest studies were guided

by one of the greatest of French surgeons, the illustrious

Desplein, who flashed across science like a meteor. By the

consensus even of his enemies, he took with him to the tomb an

incommunicable method. Like all men of genius, he had no heirs;

he carried everything in him, and carried it away with him. The

glory of a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so

long as they are alive, and their talent leaves no trace when

they are gone. Actors and surgeons, like great singers too, like

the executants who by their performance increase the power of

music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment.

Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies

of such transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day

almost forgotten, will survive in his special department without

crossing its limits. For must there not be some extraordinary

circumstances to exalt the name of a professor from the history

of Science to the general history of the human race? Had Desplein

that universal command of knowledge which makes a man the living

word, the great figure of his age? Desplein had a godlike eye; he

saw into the sufferer and his malady by an intuition, natural or

acquired, which enabled him to grasp the diagnostics peculiar to

the individual, to determine the very time, the hour, the minute

when an operation should be performed, making due allowance for

atmospheric conditions and peculiarities of individual

temperament. To proceed thus, hand in hand with nature, had he

then studied the constant assimilation by living beings, of the

elements contained in the atmosphere, or yielded by the earth to

man who absorbs them, deriving from them a particular expression

of life? Did he work it all out by the power of deduction and

analogy, to which we owe the genius of Cuvier? Be this as it may,

this man was in all the secrets of the human frame; he knew it in

the past and in the future, emphasizing the present.

But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates

did and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards

new worlds? No. Though it is impossible to deny that this

persistent observer of human chemistry possessed that antique

science of the Mages, that is to say, knowledge of the elements

in fusion, the causes of life, life antecedent to life, and what

it must be in its incubation or ever it IS, it must be confessed

that, unfortunately, everything in him was purely personal.

Isolated during his life by his egoism, that egoism is now

suicidal of his glory. On his tomb there is no proclaiming statue

to repeat to posterity the mysteries which genius seeks out at

its own cost.