Four doctors stood round him, each in turn trying his pulse,
feeling him over, and questioning him with apparent interest. The
invalid sought to guess their thoughts, putting a construction on
every movement they made, and on the slightest contractions of their
brows. His last hope lay in this consultation. This court of appeal
was about to pronounce its decision--life or death.
Valentin had summoned the oracles of modern medicine, so that he might
have the last word of science. Thanks to his wealth and title, there
stood before him three embodied theories; human knowledge fluctuated
round the three points. Three of the doctors brought among them the
complete circle of medical philosophy; they represented the points of
conflict round which the battle raged, between Spiritualism, Analysis,
and goodness knows what in the way of mocking eclecticism.
The fourth doctor was Horace Bianchon, a man of science with a future
before him, the most distinguished man of the new school in medicine,
a discreet and unassuming representative of a studious generation that
is preparing to receive the inheritance of fifty years of experience
treasured up by the Ecole de Paris, a generation that perhaps will
erect the monument for the building of which the centuries behind us
have collected the different materials.
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