FRENCH MEDICAL EDUCATION AS A LEGACY 

 FROM THE REVOLUTION 



THE LEADERS of the French Revolution were nothing if not thorough in their 

 attempts to root out all evidences of the ancien regime. Before the Revolu- 

 tion medical education in France had been in the hands of faculties and 

 colleges of medicine in various cities throughout the country from Rennes 

 in Brittany to Orange in Provence. The medical school having the best or- 

 ganization for teaching was not, as one might have imagined, located in the 

 capital, but in Montpellier. Nevertheless, Paris was undoubtedly the great 

 center for medical practice in France, and the provincial cities followed its 

 lead. The Paris Faculty of Medicine included all the physicians of the city, 

 and each year they elected certain of their number to give the public lectures. 

 It was perhaps because the lecturer felt this to be only a temporary task, soon 

 over, that official medical instruction had come to be perfunctory, often con- 

 sisting in nothing more than a reading from out-of-date textbooks like that 

 of Haller in physiology, of Boerhaave in medicine or of Hevin in pathology. 

 Students, therefore, generally preferred to attach themselves to some private 

 teacher who could give a more interesting exposition of the subject, or to one 

 who had made a name for himself in the practice of medicine. Surgery was an 

 entirely separate profession from that of medicine, and in Paris was officially 

 taught by the College of Surgery independently of the Faculty of Medicine. 

 In spite of the fact that the courses in anatomy, physiology, therapeutics, and 

 even operative procedure might last a scant three months for students of sur- 

 gery, it is claimed that these students were better taught from the point of 

 view of practical instruction than students attending the more protracted series 

 of lectures on the same subjects at the Faculty of Medicine. In both cases 

 official instruction in the art of healing still proceeded along the lines laid 

 down in the sixteenth century and had become lax and ineffective. The law- 

 makers of the Revolution changed all this with a stroke of the pen. 



The Convention, in decrees of March 8 and September 15, 1793, abolished 

 all schools, colleges, and universities, ordered all their possessions sold and 

 their endowments confiscated. This drastic purge included the Faculties of 

 Medicine and Colleges of Surgery, and seals were put on the closed doors of the 

 buildings formerly occupied by them. The idea was to make education free. 

 This was in itself a laudable enough intent, but the means adopted to bring 

 about the desired result led merely to license and confusion. The historian 

 Guizot, commenting some twenty years later on the effects of these measures, 

 said, "Ignorance and disorder gained the upper hand." Of the whole French 

 system of education the primary school alone survived, and this in spite of 

 Jean Jacques Rousseau's advice to give a child no instruction whatsoever until 

 he reached the age of twelve years, when the clean, unsullied page of the young 



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