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Résumé :

Réné Chartier (1572-1654), who was a physician in the court of Henri IV and of Louis XIII as well as a professor of surgery in the Collège Royal, edited in Greek and Latin the collection of the Hippocratic and the Galenic corpus in thirteen tomes. 20th century philologists often denigrated this monumental edition of the 17th century, covered again in the 19th century edition of Kühn—which is still the referential edition. To rehabilitate Chartier’s work, one must situate this undertaking in its historical and cultural context. My starting point was the endnotes that indicate the manuscripts used by Chartier, essentially in the Royal Library. By confronting this data with the manuscripts of each treatise and the history of the collection of Greek manuscripts in the National Library, it was then possible for me to identify twenty-two manuscripts that Chartier consulted in order to edit Galen. Secondly, the translation and the interpretation of a long keynote speech, in which Chartier recounted his editorial adventure, allowed me to map out his Republic of Medicine, which is to say I was able to draw out the different circles of his French and European collaborators. Chartier was first and foremost a member of the royal court. His edition received the patronage of the King and Cardinal Richelieu (due to Louis XIII’s illness in September of 1630), and then the support of the royal physicians. Chartier cites the physicians of the Faculté de Médicine de Paris and the professors of the Collège Royal among his collaborators. However, he equally evokes the scholarly exchanges that he had with the German Gaspard Hofmann and the English Theodore Goulston—be it through letters or be it through his travels. Finally, this article poses questions on the positioning of Chartier in medical debates that were discussed by the Faculté and academies during the first half of the 17th century.