We have often heard of the fistula of Louis XIV. It was hard, before reading the novel by Christian Carisey, locate this disease in the historical context of a teeming reign above all in the development of medical knowledge and practices. This book offers good food for thought on the limits of absolute power and especially on the trial and error of the surgery, the "medical" of the time despised and relegated to the rank of junior technical. The author clearly explains in his afterword the difference between historical fiction and history fiction. His work is between two and historical figures and fictional beings or situations after reading clearly framed. Carisey Christian took advantage of addressing the reader 2010s with words or concepts ("centimeters" p.215, "guinea pigs" p.158, "pickpockets" p.180) that may give anachronisms. This choice of a clear and explicit language offers the advantage of direct access to specific concepts without linguistic archaisms. The passionate debate on guesswork hygiene, intuition of a world of invisible creatures in the wounds shows the long road that still have to go to the discoveries of Pasteur. If you want to enter (in various senses of the word) a much more hidden universe, that of bardaches at the end of the reign of the Sun King we plunge Inthe memories of a bardash, Volume 1: The seal of which Kropotkin Philippe Gimet managed a very singular historical and linguistic journey. By passing the small cultural trip before the high-heart-certain anatomical areas of each of us with a clear and effective style, the first novel by Christian Carisey is a real moment of reading rich, tasty and rewarding for "Honest Man" in the early twenty-first century.
