Relics of Time Past

John Webster lived at the same time as René Descartes when relics, particularly of holy persons, martyrs, and saints were thought to be direct links to the dead. Descartes died in 1650, 4 months after Queen Christina of Sweden had hired him as a tutor. At her insistence, he tutored her at 5:00 a.m. Descartes died of probable pneumonia at age 54 years but his intellectual brilliance in science and philosophy raised him after death to saintly prominence. He was interred in the Adolf Fredricks churchyard in northeast Stockholm. In 1666, however, his remains were removed at night and taken to the home of the French Ambassador to Sweden, Hugues de Terlon. There they were put, but not all of them, into a copper box and transported to France for re-interment in the church at St. Geneviève du Mont in Paris. His skull was retained by a family in Sweden. It was inscribed with Latin verses to which successive owners added their signatures and verses swearing their faith to the relic. de Terlon took possession of Descartes’ right index finger “which had served as an instrument in the immortal writings of the deceased.” The travels and travails of Descartes’ bones are the subject of a book Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason by Robert Shorto (New York, NY: Doubleday Publishing; 2008). Descartes’ writings on the relationship of the mind to the mechanics of the body, science and mathematics, made him France’s greatest philosopher. He was born at La Haye in Touraine and it is proper that at least some of his remains reached Paris, secure from relic robbers, or are they?

doi: 10.3928/01477447-20090818-04

Blue Notes Editor: Charles Sorbie, MB, ChB, FRCS(E), FRCS(C) Dr. Charles Sorbie is Professor of Surgery at Queen’s University and a member of the Attending Staff at the General and Hotel Dieu Hospitals in Kingston, Ontario. A former chairman of the Department of Surgery at Queen’s University, Dr. Sorbie has been President of the Canadian Orthopaedic Research Society, the Canadian Orthopaedic Association, and the Societé Internationale de Chirurgie Orthopédique et de Traumatologie (SICOT).