It was in the year 1749 that he came to Paris from the Pyrenees,
a young medical graduate, destined to become the most fashionable
practitioner of his time. At the age of twenty-three he was holding
the professorship of anatomy at his alma mater, Montpelier, where
his father was a successful physician. At twenty-five he was elected
corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. A handsome
presence and a Tartarin de Tarascon disposition assured his success
from the start. The medical world was then composed of the emulsion of
charlatanry and science Molière ridiculed. Success stimulated envy and
jealousy. One of the richest of the older medical men set himself the
job of procuring his scalp. On a trumped-up charge of stealing jewels
from a dead patient--a favorite accusation against the doctors of the
eighteenth century--he had Bordeu's license taken away from him. The
good graces of certain women to whom Bordeu had always appealed, and
who indeed supplied the funds to get him started in Paris, rammed
through two acts of Parliament to reinstate him. Nothing daunted, he
returned to his quest for a court clientele, and was rewarded finally
by having the moribund Louis XV as a patient.

This was the man with whom the modern history of the internal
secretions begins. Not content with adventures among the courtiers and
desperadoes of the most corrupt court in the most corrupt city of the
world, he went in for research. The high power microscope that came
into vogue when he was studying, revealed vague wonders which he
described in a monograph, "Researches into the mucous tissues or
cellular organs." But what makes him interesting is a slender volume
on the "Medical Analysis of the Blood," published in the year of the
American Declaration of Independence. The sexual side of men and women
aroused Bordeu's most ardent enthusiasms. Starting with observations