Lecture 8 - Nineteenth-Century Medicine: The Paris School of Medicine

In the decades immediately following the French Revolution, Paris was at the center of a series of major developments in medical science, sometimes described as the transition from medieval to modern medicine. Although the innovations associated with the Paris School were in large part products of the ideological and institutional transformations brought on by the Revolution, they belong to a long list of challenges to the Galenic orthodoxy of "library medicine." Successive scientists and physicians had questioned the exclusive commitment of medicine to interpreting ancient texts; in the hospitals of Paris, a new medical epistemology, focused on empirical observation and the diagnosis of specific diseases, was put into practice.