A Day in the Life of the Doctors of History is a series about the physicians who changed medicine, for good or for worse. Tonight you live one day in the life of Guy de Chauliac, surgeon to Pope Clement VI, in Avignon in the seventh month of the Black Death.

He stayed when the other doctors left. He tells us why, and it is four words long, and it is not courage.

✨ IN THIS EPISODE

Avignon has no walls in 1348. The city lies open on every side; anyone can walk in.
The courts are shut until Michaelmas, 29 September — the business the whole city lives on has stopped.
One man's entire job is the wax: every lamp and candle in the palace. Another's is the water. Painters are still on the scaffold in December.
The pope's lion is still being fed. On 5 July, in the seventh month of the mortality, the accounts record the payment to its keeper.
Flight was not cowardice. It was the first line of treatment, taught in the schools.
There is no queue at his door that morning, for the first time in his life.

Almost everything you hear tonight, Chauliac wrote down himself, fifteen years later; I say so when someone else is speaking. No screaming, no jump scares, one voice, no ad breaks, and a story that ends with the lamp going out.

Sleep well.
— Dr Elias Marlow, the Sleepless Doctor

⏱ CHAPTERS

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:07 The seventh month
00:04:44 Who you are
00:06:57 The palace before light
00:13:31 The city
00:17:51 Where it came from
00:22:37 What you believe
00:26:09 What you have seen since January
00:30:32 The other doctors
00:33:53 What the people say
00:38:31 The pope
00:42:54 The remedies
00:46:37 The evening you become the patient
00:50:52 Afterwards

📚 SOURCES

This channel works from primary documents wherever one exists.

Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive Chirurgia Magna (1363), Tract. II Doct. II Cap. V, "Digressio de mortalitate" — the two forms, the contagion, "men died without servants and were buried without priests", the conjunction of 1345, the prevention, the cure, his own illness, "to avoid infamy". Latin: Joubert 1585, pp. 104-105; French: Nicaise 1890, pp. 167-173
His life: chapter act of Saint-Just, Lyon, 17 May 1344; the Officiales of Clement VI in Marini, Degli archiatri pontifici, 1784 — papal chaplain from 2 January 1352, AFTER the plague; Arch. dép. Lozère G 2728 f. 26v, his death in 1368 near Lyon
Louis Heyligen of Beeringen, letter from Avignon, 27 April 1348, in Breve chronicon clerici anonymi, ed. De Smet, Recueil des chroniques de Flandre III, 1856, pp. 14-18; English in Horrox, The Black Death, MUP 1994, doc. 5 — the empty houses, the new cemetery, the hired bearers, the almonry bread, the dissections, the processions, the courts suspended until Michaelmas
Félix Digonnet, Le Palais des Papes d'Avignon, 1907 — the old palace and the building site; the Grande Audience vaulted November 1347 but unglazed and unfurnished; the west wing measured February 1348; Giovannetti painting the consistory May to December 1348; the great kitchen standing since Benedict XII; the master of the water (magister aque) and the master of the wax (magister cere), pp. 190-191; the menagerie and its paid keeper. His authority for the two offices is the Avisamenta pro anno 1409 — the offices are certain, that account of their duties sixty years later
K. H. Schäfer, Die Ausgaben der Apostolischen Kammer unter Benedikt XII., Klemens VI. und Innocenz VI., 1914
Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews, PIMS Toronto 1988, docs. 372-374 — Sicut Judeis of 5 July 1348, which says nothing of the plague; Quamvis perfidiam Iudeorum of 26 September, the plague bull; the 1 October reissue, which names debt. It was written to expire after a year
Samuel K. Cohn Jr., "The Black Death and the Burning of Jews", Past & Present 196 (2007) — driven by courts and elites, not mobs, and often ahead of the plague
Raymond Chalin de Vinario, De peste libri tres, Lyon 1552 — four visitations, each smaller. He was a boy in 1348 and the text is a sixteenth-century rewriting, so only the shape of his count is used

FIVE THINGS WE DELIBERATELY DO NOT SAY

That Clement VI summoned Chauliac from Lyon to fight the plague. He says he was already in the pope's service; the summons is a 17th-century note.
That Chauliac told the pope to sit between two fires and see nobody. Not in Chauliac — he mentions fire once, in a general list, with no pope and no chamber.
That he trepanned the pope, treated Petrarch's Laura, or quarrelled with Petrarch.
That he died of plague and lies at Champfleury. The evidence points to Lyon.
A population figure for Avignon. There isn't a reliable one.

🎨 The pictures are painted for this episode. Chauliac's face is the same throughout on purpose; where a medieval painter would have known better, the fault is ours.

A story from the history of medicine, told by a storyteller. Not medical advice.

#HistoryForSleep #BlackDeath #Avignon #SleepStory #BedtimeHistory