58 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



in 1810 the uncle and nephew were coupled in the eulogy de- 

 livered by Cuvier at the Institut de France on those of its members 

 who had died during the French Revolution, a period the orator 

 described as ' the fatal epoch when all personal merit, all inde- 

 pendent pre-eminence, was odious to authority.' After another 

 half -century Sainte-Beuve was to write of them as ' the two 

 names that form the true crown of this great literary and scientific 

 century of Geneva.' 



It was two years later that de Saussure first came in contact 

 with Albrecht von Haller. 1 Their acquaintance was brought 

 about in this wise. In 1758 Madame de Saussure 's health gave 

 renewed cause for anxiety. For three years she had been under 

 the care of Theodore Tronchin, the most famous doctor of his 

 time, and a notable character in the Geneva and Paris of his day. 

 An old friend of the de Saussure family, and destined to be closely 

 connected with Horace Benedict in after years, he calls for some 

 notice here. Tronchin's father had lost his fortune by the collapse 

 of Law and the South Sea Bubble. At the age of eighteen 

 Theodore came to England, where Lord Bolingbroke, with whom 

 there was some family connection, introduced him to Swift, Pope, 

 and Addison but not to a career. The youth went on to 

 Holland, married a great-niece of John de Witte, and studied and 

 successfully practised medicine for twenty-five years. When at 

 the age of forty-five he set up in Geneva, Tronchin earned the 

 cordial dislike of his colleagues by his contempt for the traditional 

 treatment then in vogue . He ridiculed their antiquated ' systems,' 

 he condemned their violent remedies, he called the medical 

 science, as they practised it, 'the scourge of the human race,' he 

 preached observing nature and helping it to cure itself. ' He,' 

 wrote Grimm, ' treats not the sickness, but the sick man.' His 

 favourite prescriptions were moderate diet, pure air, country life, 

 riding above all, out-of-door exercise. He recommended an 

 Abbe to chop wood and an Abbesse to do her own room and 

 polish the floor ! He was an enthusiast for cold baths. ' As long 

 as the Romans,' he wrote, ' after their exercise on the Campus 

 Martius threw themselves into the Tiber they were the masters of 

 the world ; the hot baths of Agrippa and Nero turned them into 

 slaves.' If he made enemies in his own profession, he had for his 

 1 For a fuller notice of Bonnet and A. von Haller, see chapter xvi. 



