La médecine des lumières: Tout autour de Tissot (review)

Vincent Barras and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier, eds. La médecine des lumières: Tout autour de Tissot. Bibliothèque d'Histoire des Sciences, no. 3. Geneva: Georg, 2001. vii + 358 pp. Ill. Sw. Fr. 50.00 (paperbound, 2-8257-0704-X).

Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728-97) is a fine choice for a study of Enlightenment medicine: his life spanned the eighteenth century; his city, Lausanne, was accessible, from an intellectual, cultural, and religious point of view, to French-, English-, and German-speaking physicians and patients; and his two famous books, On Onanism (1760) and Advice to the People Regarding their Health (1761), dealt with topics that preoccupied all strata of society. Moreover, the Fonds Tissot in the Lausanne library has preserved his manuscripts and thus offers a treasure trove for researchers. In a rousing finale to this collection of papers, Jean-Daniel Caudaux documents fifteen themes for future work, ranging from eighteenth-century Lausanne architecture, theater, learned societies, music, and salons to painters, libraries, and printers.

The two dozen essays in this volume touch on as many approaches to Tissot's thought, work, influence, or personality and combine to create the context "tout autour de Tissot." But his writings are not directly discussed. Two prominent "bookends" hold the work together: Roy Porter—in French!—opens the volume by proposing a dilemma as the leading theme: enlightened medicine embodied progress in the understanding and treatment of disease, but writers such as George Cheyne or Jean Jacques Rousseau warned that civilized living weakened moral fiber and fostered illnesses such as hysteria and hypochondriasis. The other contributors do not pick up on the negative interpretation. (I will mention the other "bookend," Olivier Faure, in due course.)

Part 1, "Medicine and Society," begins with the proposition by Matthew Ramsey that in the Enlightenment a liberal model of medical power opposed a monopolistic model, and Tissot was deeply involved in their confrontation. Solange Simon-Mazoyer paints a frightening picture of the tyranny that fashion exerted over women: they had to be beautiful or else enter the convent, so they painted their faces with creams, powders, and rouges that often contained lead-based chemicals; they wore a harmful permanent mask. Frédéric Sardet, the director of the Lausanne archives, studies the checklist of "essential questions to be answered" that a patient consulting Tissot by letter could find in Advice to the People (p. 57).

In part 2, "Theoretical Goals and Medical Practices in Tissot's Work," Othmar Keel continues his impressive campaign to prove that the anatomo-clinical method was not invented by the Paris School. The rest of part 2 depicts Tissot as a peacemaker in the rise of vitalism as a challenge to both animism and mechanism. Eric Hamraoui documents correspondence and discussion with the French royal physician Jean Bertrand Sénac; Hubert Steinke analyzes Tissot as a translator of Haller; and Urs Boschung shows Tissot's calming influence on the quarrels between Haller and De Haen over irritability and sensitivity.

Most of the contributors to part 3 use the prosopographic approach: Laurence Brockliss's four physicians are letter-writers, while Daniel Teysseire's foursome are aficionados of botany and collectors of antiquities. Micheline Louis-Courvoisier and Vincent Barras (working with Philippe Rieder) weave a tale of contemporary worries, observations, and habits concerning ordinary people's health. Jacques Gélis contributes a masterful comparative account of the competitive professions of midwife and obstetrician; the heroes of his story are the brothers Fried of Strasbourg, founders of the first midwifery school as early as 1728.

Finally, part 4, "Texts and Contexts," presents Tissot as an author who, according to François Rosset, satisfied "the social demand of medicalization" (p. 249). In Danielle Chaperon's essay we also find Tissot advocating sociability and conversation, lest writers turn into misanthropists. Tissot's Traité des nerfs (1778-80) is the subject of an esoteric...