In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • L’acte de naissance de la médecine moderne: La création des écoles de santé, Paris, 14 frimaire an III (4 décembre 1794)
  • Toby Gelfand
Jean Bernard, Jean-François Lemaire, and Alain Larcan, eds. L’acte de naissance de la médecine moderne: La création des écoles de santé, Paris, 14 frimaire an III (4 décembre 1794). Collection les empêcheurs de penser en rond. Paris: Synthélabo, 1995. 125 pp. F 84.00 (paperbound).

In December 1994, a colloquium held in the vast amphitheater of the old Paris medical school on the street of the same name celebrated the bicentenary of the decree of the French Revolutionary Convention establishing the écoles de santé on 14 Frimaire of the year III. As medical historians generally concede, the new schools, particularly the one in Paris, brought about a radical departure from Old Regime professional institutions and practices, centered as they now were on hospital teaching and research and on the training in common of formerly separated future surgeons and physicians.

Perhaps most striking about the eleven brief papers collected in this volume under the imposing title “the birth certificate of modern medicine” is their [End Page 155] enthusiasm for the enduring historical importance of the Revolutionary medical schools. While adding little to the considerable existing secondary literature on the establishment of the schools, they document and commemorate the event. The role of several familiar leading figures—Antoine Fourcroy, P.-J.-G Cabanis, and Jean-Antoine Chaptal—is duly noted, and there is much citation of the founding legislation as well as glimpses at related military factors, civil hospitals, conceptual aspects, and artifacts.

The contributors—mostly physicians, including three members of the National Academy of Medicine, and all (with one exception) French—have reason to be proud of their medical patrimony. Nonhistorians will share the sentiment of Jean Bernard, distinguished medical scientist and member of the Académie Française, when he states in his concluding remarks that he learned much from the day’s proceedings.

The one dissenting note comes from Roger Hahn’s critical review of historiography on the Paris clinical school. A historian of science rather than of medicine (and not a physician, although mistakenly identified as such in the list of contributors), the Berkeley professor argues that historical accounts, including those by Erwin H. Ackerknecht and Michel Foucault, have consistently misconstrued and exaggerated the meaning of what happened in Paris two centuries ago. Hahn’s “party-spoiling” assertion, which elicited a rebuttal from another colloquium participant, cannot be discussed in detail here. It is flawed by anachronistic perspectives taken from later medicine, a misunderstanding of the situation prior to 1794, and a misreading of Foucault’s analysis among others. But even if Hahn’s revisionist claim had substance and the Paris “birth certificate of modern medicine” were illegitimate, the historical problem of the school’s reputation remains no less weighty. For that certificate was not attributed solely in recognition of a few outstanding contemporary medical personalities, nor accorded in retrospect by twentieth-century historians, as Hahn suggests. It represented a consensus among nineteenth-century medical and scientific elites throughout Europe and America dating back to the Revolutionary generation itself. The major transformation that was perceived to be happening in Parisian medicine—and that in my view, was in fact happening—deserves its birthday party. Even more than this commemorative volume, it merits ongoing research in the extensive archives available and historical interpretation of the social and cultural significance of this revolution in medicine.

Toby Gelfand
University of Ottawa
...

Share