Faced with overwhelming testimonies and anonymous letters piling up in the office of the examining magistrate, the good doctor Biarrot does not budge: he maintains against all odds that he is innocent! The only care he was able to provide was, he says, in accordance with his Hippocratic oath, the commitment that any new doctor takes to practice his art in accordance with the rules defined by his peers. An oath which, at the time, prohibited practitioners from giving women any abortive procedure whatsoever under penalty of being struck off and ending up in prison. However, no one is fooled. It is said that at the beginning of the twentieth century, about five hundred thousand clandestine abortions were practiced each year in France and many of them were carried out by doctors or midwives who operated under the cloak… As if finally, the Hippocratic oath became, in short, an oath of hypocrites.
Expensive interventions
The Bayonnais judge noted that Dr. Long-Savigny was certainly sensitive to the distress of his patients but also to the thickness of their wallets, he charged between fifty and two hundred francs for each of his services. Treatments that he hid all the more willingly from the Public Treasury because they were prohibited. In Biarritz, gossip is rife near the municipal halls. Many laugh at the embattled deputy mayor who is compared to the famous Doctor Jekill, the hero of Stevenson’s novel published three decades earlier: a dedicated and esteemed doctor, tails, who concealed, on the face, a kind of Mr. Hyde for his vice of lucre and dubious practices. At the town hall, her faithful friends scream political conspiracy, accusing these women of bad life of taking revenge on a very prominent elected member of the Radical Party. The trial which opens in Pau, six months later, promises to attract crowds and unleash passions.