Frog’s spawn and toad’s tongues formed an old remedy for spots on the skin, and in the “gentle kick” we have a satire on the homœopathic theory of medicine. CHAPTER V. LE SAGE. Le Sage draws a vivid picture of the medical practitioner of his day in his well-known work _Gil Blas_. Doctor Sangrado, bigoted, obstinate, and dominated by one idea, was doubtless very true to nature, and a type of physician not unfrequently met with even later than the seventeenth century. The character is supposed to have been drawn from that of Doctor Hecquet, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Paris, a man extremely thin and spare in body, and who is said never to have drank anything but water. Le Sage describes his physician as “a tall, meagre, pale man, who had kept the shears of Clotho employed during forty years. He had a very solemn appearance, weighed his discourse, and gave an emphasis to his expressions: his reason was geometrical, and his opinions extremely singular.” All the city looked upon him as another Hippocrates. The licentiate Sedillo, a fat clerical epicurean, having fallen sick with the fever and gout, this great physician was called in, and after examining his patient delivered himself of the following diagnosis: “The business here is to supply the defect of obstructed perspiration; others in my place would doubtless prescribe saline draughts, diuretics, diaphoretics, and such medicines as abound with mercury and sulphur; but cathartics and sudorifics are pernicious drugs invented by quacks, and all the preparations of chemistry are only calculated to do mischief,” said this disciple of Æsculapius. “You must renounce all palatable food; and do you drink wine?” “Yes,” said the poor canon; “wine and water.” “Oh! watered as much as you please,” replied the physician: “what an irregularity is here! what a frightful regimen! You ought to have been dead long ago. If you had drunk nothing but pure water all your life, and had been satisfied with simple nourishment, such as, for example, boiled apples, peas, and beans, you would not now be tormented with gout, and all your limbs would perform their functions with ease.” The poor canon promised to obey in all these things, but the doctor hadn’t finished yet, for he sent for a surgeon, and ordered him to let “six good porringers of blood as the first effort” to supply the want of perspiration. “And return in three hours, and take as much more, and repeat the same to-morrow,” said this veritable leech to the surgeon, “for a patient cannot be bled too much.” Besides this, the unfortunate patient was dosed incessantly with warm water, two or three pints in as many draughts, “for,” said the physician, “water is the true specific in all distempers what-ever”.