Splendour and servitudes of the Sun : An anecdotic story of Louis XIV’s health journal.

Louis-Dieudonné, fourteenth of the name, King of France and Navarre,lived for seventy seven years, a great age for his time. Historyhas kept in mind the name of his battles, the surname of hismistresses and the splendour of his castles. But history ignoresnearly everything about the difficult life he spent because of thenumerous diseases he suffered, and because of the daily painfultherapeutic constraints he tolerated from his physicians, although hewas then the most powerful man in his Kingdom. This lecture invitesthe reader to follow, in the original tome, the King’s healthjournal, written several centuries ago by these physicians, and comparetheir strange antique treatments applied to a large gallery ofprestigious patients, with those actually carried out, in similarpathological conditions, by modern reconstructive microsurgerons.