Medicine in the Civic Life of Eighteenth-Century Montpellier

It has frequently been argued that in the urban communities of early modern Europe social solidarity was encouraged chiefly by traditions, rituals, and practices associated with religious life. ¹ In this paper, which focuses on eighteenth-century Montpellier, I will argue that institutions and social practices associated with the Montpellier medical establishment contributed to the development and maintenance of a sense of urban identity and solidarity in that community. Another, simpler way to state my thesis is to say that Montpellier was a “medical town,” and that this had beneficial social consequences for the community. ²

The term communal solidarity requires some elucidation. I want to distance myself from romanticized conceptions of the harmony of premodern European cities that reify the contemporary image of the town as the “social body”—an organism whose diverse functions were clearly distributed, properly hierarchized, and finely tuned. ³ The image of the smoothly functioning social body was precisely that—an image. It was used in various discourses to affirm that authority, as constituted, was natural and therefore just. ⁴ The widespread recourse to such images from the Renaissance forward should not blind us, however, to the tensions and conflicts that beset the early modern town no less than any other agglomeration of contentious human beings. Communal solidarity does not mean, then, the absence of social conflict. Rather, I use the term in two senses: first, to indicate a sense of shared identity and destiny; and second, to refer to mechanisms and conditions that forestalled or mitigated potential social conflicts. In the eighteenth century the medical establishment (broadly conceived) made important contributions to the civic life of Montpellier in both these senses.

Montpellier’s character as an urban center certainly did not derive exclusively from medicine: it was home also to important administrative, commercial, industrial, and ecclesiastical institutions and activities. Yet, as I hope to show, observers might well have listed medicine as the town’s most important product, as Jules Michelet was to do in the 1830s when he referred to Montpellier as “ville de médecine, de parfums et de vert-de-gris.” ⁵ Similarly, medical establishments of the eighteenth century played a prominent role in relieving the social tensions that were, from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, acute. In those years, the life of Montpellier was marked by devastating economic crises, tax insurrections, fratricidal religious strife, and high levels of physical violence. By contrast the eighteenth century—at least up to the final decades—was an era of tolerance, prosperity, population growth, and, as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie puts it, a “general improvement in behavior.” ⁶ My argument is that by a variety of means the Montpellier medical establishment significantly contributed to the decline in social contentiousness and the corresponding growth in social solidarity. Again, medical institutions were but part of a complex social dynamic. From the early eighteenth century forward, Montpellier’s economic situation improved—the misery and want of the preceding “century of crisis” giving way to a new prosperity based on the expansion of commerce, viticulture, and the manufacture of verdigris and a range of textile products. The oppressive fiscal load of the era of Louis XIV was partially lifted. Perhaps most important, religious feeling, and the readiness to engage in violence to defend belief, had greatly diminished. ⁷

Many patterns and movements converged, then, to produce an era of relative social peace, and although in the last decades of the century many of these benign trends were interrupted, even then the town remained a site of relative calm amid the storms of the Revolution. ⁸ While the role of medical establishments in this larger process cannot be isolated with precision, it is possible to suggest the range of activities and functions performed by medical establishments that—sometimes deliberately, sometimes unwittingly—contributed to the harmony of this eighteenth-century “ville de médecine.”

Montpellier is located in southern France about five miles inland from the Mediterranean in the region of Lower Languedoc. To the north of the city are the rocky foothills of the Cévennes, a...