Imagine this: you're the Sun King, absolute ruler of France and fiercely proud of "l'État, c'est moi!", but you can't ride a horse or sit on a throne without excruciating pain because of the fistula in your rectum. You undergo the excruciating surgery, wide awake and without anaesthesia ('cause, you know, seventeenth century), but surprisingly you SURVIVE, and, as a result, rectal surgery goes viral all over France, especially among the nobility! Lords and ladies even went to Versailles to take their haemorroids removed by the royal surgeon...
Historical YouTuber Kaz Rowe now has a video essay on the craze. And of course I had to give my two sous about the procedure:
This reminds me of the series The Serpent Queen, where the titular character's uncle / guardian, Pope Clement, played by CHARLES DANCE (CHARLES F-ING DANCE, AKA TYWIN LANNISTER), likewise has a fistula removed from his rectum without anaesthesia, squealing like a wounded pig and completely out of character (I know, Tywin Lannister is Rodrigo Borgia without the Papacy, and here Charles Dance plays a Renaissance pope [not a Borgia, but a Medici, nevertheless a Renaissance pope] who has to undergo the excruciating procedure!).
In Shakespeare's All Well that Ends Well, the female lead likewise successfully operates the King of France of a rectal fistula. The play was written in 1598, and the Sun King was operated in 1686, about a century later! So Shakespeare may have prophesied the future long before The Simpsons...
