Jean Héroard
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"ONE of the unwritten laws of contemporary morality, the strictest and best respected of all, requires adults to avoid any reference, above all any humorous reference, to sexual matters in the presence of children. This notion was entirely foreign to the society of old. The modern reader of the diary1 in which Henri IV’s physician, Heroard, recorded the details of the young Louis XIII’s life is astonished by the liberties which people took with children, by the coarseness of the jokes they made, and by the indecency of gestures made in public which shocked nobody and which were regarded as perfectly natural. 1No other document can give us a better idea of the non-existence of the modern idea of childhood at the beginning of the seventeenth century." |
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Jean Héroard was a French doctor, veterinarian and anatomist, born July 22, 1551 in Hauteville-la-Guichard (department of Manche) and died February 11, 1628 in front of La Rochelle, during the siege of that town. He wrote a diary giving every day the events that could affect the health of Louis XIII and a book that places him among the pioneers of the veterinary art of horses.
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