Leechcraft Liposuction

7 March 2024

· A Frenchman makes un grand faux pas with Elizabeth ·

1560 was the second year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the twenty-seventh of her life. I was a small lad of ten, living at Hill Hall with Sir Thomas Smith, studying languages, maps, history, and everything else he put in front of me.

At Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne in 1558 she did not appoint Sir Thomas to her Privy Council as he deserved, because he didn’t have the sort of personality willing to show her the deference she felt was due to a woman of her pedigree. This was why he was back in Essex teaching me. His being on the shelf during Mary Tudor’s Catholic reign and the early years of Elizabeth’s represented a major pivot-point in the history of English literature, if you want to look at it that way. I could never have become Shake-Speare without the wide-ranging one-on-one education I received from Sir Thomas. It began when I was not yet five and continued almost without a break through my twelfth year, when the Fates relocated me to William Cecil’s. I describe this time in more detail in the section about Sir Thomas in METAMETAMORPHOSES.

Between Sir Thomas’s opinion of Elizabeth’s vanity and his opinion of Frenchmen, I expect he enjoyed the following story when he heard it.

Pierre Boaistuau, Sieur de Launay (1517–1566) was a Breton author whose best-selling treatises and collections of stories combined elements that would be found nowadays in tabloid scandal sheets, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and Wikipedia articles. Boaistuau’s best known works were Le Théâtre du monde (1558); Histoires tragiques, six novellas adapted from Bandello including a proto-Romeo and JulietHistoire de deux Amants, dont l’un mourut de venin, l’autre de tristesse (Story of two Lovers, one of whom dies of poison, the other of grief) variant (1559); and Histoires prodigieuses (1560), or to give it its full title in English: The most extraordinary and memorable stories that have been observed since the birth of Jesus Christ until our century: extracts from several famous Greek and Latin authors, sacred and secular. This book is full of monsters, conjoined twins, a footless bird unable to stop flying, a man who washed himself with molten lead, the death of Pliny the Elder in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and a host of other natural and not-so-natural phenomena. One can easily imagine Lobster Boy within its pages.

Ahead of the 1560 publication of Histoires prodigieuses, Boaistuau went on tour to drum up publicity. In London he presented a beautifully lettered and illustrated manuscript copy to Elizabeth, the work also dedicated to her. The preface included a poem, Ode pour la Royne aux Muses. For the Queen of the Muses.

Boaistuau’s royal audience began well enough but did not end that way. I was of course not there at the time, but I would wager a manor that the turning point occurred when Elizabeth’s attention was drawn to this illustration and its description:

The great tyrant Denis Heracleot surrendered himself to pleasures of the table and bed, doing nothing but drinking, eating, and sleeping all day, becoming so huge and fat with such monstrous arms and legs that he dared not show himself among his people for fear of being mocked. Remaining thus a recluse, he was forced day and night to apply a great many leeches to his limbs to remove the humour that fed his fatness, otherwise he would have suffocated, as you see in the accompanying portrait.

The printed edition of Histoires prodigieuses was published in Paris after Boaistuau escaped returned to France. It was dedicated to the tres hault et tres puissant Seigneur Jehan de Rieux, Chevalier, Seigneur d’Asserac. The earlier homage to la tres illustre, tres excellente, et tres vertueuse Princesse Elizabeth, par la grace de Dieu Roine d’Angleterre was nowhere to be found, nor was the obsequious ode.

Boaistuau never crossed the Channel again.

I am aware that the leech treatment wasn’t technically liposuction. The creatures were sucking blood rather than adipose tissue, but the king (?) was trying to reduce and I wanted the alliteration in my title. The contemporary diagnosis was that Heracleot’s blood contained an excess of the sanguinary humour that created his gargantuan appetite. Leeches were an alternative to opening a vein and bleeding him that way.

So who was Denis Heracleot, this ersatz Henry Tudor? Some translations call him a fabled ancient tyrant, others give only his name, but I’ve been unable to find him outside of references circling right back to Boaistuau’s book. There is a Heracleon of Ephesus in The Learned Banqueters by Athenaeus, a 2nd-century CE work of convivial table talk among literate guests at a series of Greek dinner parties. They talk a lot about food but it’s a bit of a stretch. Heliodorus in his Ethiopica (3rd-4th century CE) mentioned a mouth of the Nile called Heracleot, but that’s even more of a stretch and in any case the book was fiction. I even looked for French anagrams– Henri can be picked out of the name, but I couldn’t make any sense of the rest.

Whoever he was or wasn’t, in later editions of Histoires prodigieuses Denis Heracleot lost his crown as well as his royal mien.

1567

1575

Too late, Pierre.

Hirudotherapy, the medical use of blood-sucking leeches, was standard practice in ancient and pre-modern times. Leeches still have applications in today’s medicine but you don’t hear much about them unless you go looking. In my day treatment with leeches was so routine that a doctor was often called a leech, though the Old English word læce actually meant a doctor or healer. Even doctors thought it referred to the worms.

In Timon of Athens the rebel Alcibiades, returning to the city as its conqueror, ends the play with a speech of healing:

• [Dead] Is noble Timon, of whose memory
• Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,
• And I will use the olive with my sword;
• Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each
• Prescribe to other as each other’s leech.
• Let our drums strike.

Unrelated posts

This post is a bit of randomness without obvious connections to others. Since I don’t want to waste the space, here are three posts that I happen to like especially well.

• Perhaps the biggest literary joke that I pulled in my lifetime, or at least the biggest intentional one. Hardly a soul has ever heard of it, much less gets it. I still think it’s hilarious. Most Wonderful: Webbe’s Travels, posted 23 April 2022.

• This post made one of my readers cry empathic tears, which is a compliment for any writer. Lost and Found, posted 7 October 2021.

• Poetry and Hamlet at the same time. The poem makes more sense if you’ve read this one first. Poem: Mommy, by Prince Hamlet, posted 13 July 2020.

Sources and additional reading

• • Banner: Sanguisuga (leech), detail, from Der naturen bloeme [galerij.kb.nl]
• · by Jacob van Maerlant
• · Royal Library of the Netherlands
• · circa 1340-1350 (copy 1)
• · page 135r

• • Denis Heracleot: illustration from the presentation copy of Histoires prodigieuses (etc) given to Queen Elizabeth by Pierre Boaistuau, 1560 [wellcomecollection.org]
• · The Wellcome Collection
• ·

Have a spare £10,000Price reduced from £12,500! A bargain. and know how to read early-modern French? Maggs Brothers booksellers in London has a 1560 first edition printed copy of Histoires prodigieuses for sale. Not as fancy as Elizabeth’s, but just as old.

• • Histoires prodigieuses in English [Early English Books Online]
• · Denis Heracleot is found on page 82, though EEBO has no images, only the transcribed text.

• • Shakespeare and the Four Humours [wellcomecollection.org]
• • “And there’s the humor of it”: Shakespeare and the four humors [nlm.nih.gov]
• · Medicine, such as it was, was another important subject in my pedagogical curriculum. I may have attended Cambridge for a short while, but Sir Thomas was my university.

VERO NIHIL VERIUS