In the seventeenth century, Theodore de Mayerne enjoyed international fame as a physician. Today knowledge of him is largely confined to historians of medicine, among whom he is celebrated as the founder of clinical medicine and for making chemical medicine respectable in England. Mayerne's detailed medical notes – his Ephemerides – are an invaluable source for medical history. For this first full biography of the great Huguenot physician, the late Hugh Trevor-Roper made full use of both the Ephemerides and the rich array of archival sources documenting the social and political context of his practice as a physician. The result is a study which has as much to tell us about politics and people as about medicine.

Mayerne's life was certainly ‘various’, as the subtitle of the book proclaims: he lived in several countries, pursuing a variety of interests and activities besides practising medicine. His full name and titles encapsulate some of this variety: Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, Baron d'Aubonne. The knighthood was bestowed by James I for services to the English crown, the Swiss barony was bought with the proceeds of his medical practice; early on he dropped the plebeian ‘Turquet’ but retained the more aristocratic-sounding ‘Mayerne’. Although he evidently profited both socially and financially from his high-class connections, he also used those connections for the benefit of the Huguenot cause for which he worked tirelessly throughout his life. Contemporary accounts testify to his great personal charm and unfailing courtesy.

Born into a family of French Protestants exiled in Geneva, educated in France and Germany, Mayerne lived most of his professional life as an exile in London. Ever the outsider – a Protestant among Catholics, a Frenchman among the English, a proponent of chemical medicine among Galenists – Mayerne became the most trusted of insiders: the confidant of monarchs, who acted, as occasion required, as a secret agent for his royal master. As doctor to royalty, Mayerne found himself close to the often dangerous political events of his time, yet he managed to transcend them. He was consulted by Catholics and Protestants alike, bishops, princes and ambassadors, in both England and Europe. He managed to retain his position as physician to the king of France, even while in exile, serving as physician to the king of England. He remained in London during the English Civil War, but was granted safe passage by Parliament to attend royalist patients in Oxford. He was also an astute manager of his financial affairs. His access to the great and powerful put him in a good position to bid for the rich pickings available to courtiers. Nevertheless the chief source of his wealth was, apparently, his extensive medical practice beyond the court.

Trevor-Roper was not greatly concerned with the technicalities of early modern medicine or the kind of methodological issues which occupy medical historians such as Brian Nance, whose 2007 study of Mayerne's Ephemerides will serve as a useful supplement to the study under review. Lord Dacre's particular forte was analysing intrigues of the complex social world beyond the consulting room, which are related here with an establishment insider's understanding of the inner workings of the patrician class. His recounting of the medical wars precipitated by the Medical Faculty of Paris's attempted suppression of Paracelsian medicine in the 1590s shows how Mayerne's negotiating skills, as much as his professional authority, helped secure the inclusion of chemical remedies in the Pharmacopoeia londinensis and the establishment of the Society for Apothecaries as a separate City guild in 1617.

This is a remarkable book for several reasons. First of all there is the sheer detective work involved in mining the archives to produce a fascinating personal portrait of Mayerne and his times. Of particular value is Trevor-Roper's piecing together of the history of the French Huguenots before the diaspora consequent upon the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The book is also remarkable by virtue of its being a posthumous publication, brought to press by the dedicated labours of Blair Worden, who, although not a medical historian, has performed the task of editing in exemplary fashion. Since the book in fact originated in the 1970s, it is in many respects a period piece. This is certainly true of its historical style – the confident overarching themes underpinned by an impressive grasp of details, and an engaging focus on personalities. Perhaps the period stamp of the study is most apparent in Trevor-Roper's acceptance of Hermeticism as an important component of early modern science and medicine – testimony to his fascination with Frances Yates, whom he held in the highest regard. As a historian, he was clearly drawn to Yates's ability to capture the cultural and intellectual alterity of the Renaissance, and her genius for tapping rich seams of historical material overlooked by more conventional historiographies (as in her masterpieces, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947) and The Art of Memory (London, 1966)). He shared with Yates an admiration for Marjorie Nicolson's Conway Letters (1930), where Mayerne figures as physician to Anne Conway. Yates's claims that Hermeticism played a pivotal role in the Scientific Revolution proved too much for historians of science and have damaged her own posthumous reputation. Few now accept her views. The invocation of Hermeticism does not, however, undermine Trevor-Roper's account of Mayerne, partly because his treatment of it is not intrusive; Hermes Trismegistus is named only once in the main text and Hermeticism is defined in terms which equate to chemical medicine mainly in the account of Joseph du Chesne and Andreas Libavius.

Trevor-Roper's Mayerne is certainly no mystic. His reformist mentality is compared to Francis Bacon's. Conceivably the death of Yates in 1981 and the subsequent disfavour into which her views fell may account for Trevor-Roper's abandonment of his biography. The text as published is in fact complete in all necessary respects. Notwithstanding the lapse of time between composition and publication, Europe's Physician is a compelling and richly informative study with much to offer everyone with an interest in early seventeenth-century history, science and medicine.