The City of Paris and the Rise of Clinical Medicine

Abstract

This article argues that the city of Paris played a unique role in shaping clinical medicine at the Paris hospital at the turn of the nineteenth century. Under outstanding clinicians such as Corvisart, Pinel, Bichat, Desault, Alibert, Bayle, and Laennec, who headed the "Paris School," teaching and research became hospital-based. New methods such as percussion, mediate auscultation, and psychological evaluation were introduced, and autopsies became routine. Chaptal, a physcian and minister of internal affairs under the Consulate, played a key role by creating the Paris Hospital and Health Councils, the Central Pharmacy, and central triage for hospital admissions. These municipal councils supervised the practice and teaching of anatomo-clinical medicine and the concomitant social changes involved in the delivery of health care to a city of six hundred thousand inhabitants. These changes included the orderly provision of bodies for dissection, the subordination of nurses to physicians, the teaching of preclinical courses, and the adaptation of the confiscated religious buildings to house patients grouped according to their diseases. The new arrangements fostered the rise of medical specialties, including public health, practiced by hygienists who turned Paris itself into a patient.

Research paradigms and useful inventions in medicine: Patents and licensing by teams of clinical and basic scientists in Academic Medical Centers

“…It is worth noting that the translational model of medical innovation is not rooted in historical linkages between science and medicine: the application of scientific methods to medical innovation is relatively recent, and the hospital, not the laboratory, was the primary source of discovery for most of medical history. Even before the development of a formal medical profession, hospitals provided physicians with "buildings and bodies"opportunities to not only observe and treat the sick, but to dissect and learn from the dead (Bynum, 1994;Weiner and Sauter, 2003). The introduction of modern scientific methods to medical research can be traced to Paris hospitals in the 19 th century under the guidance of the great experimental 1 http://www.ncats.nih.gov/about/about.html.…”

See me, touch me, heal me : the role of visuo-spatial ability in virtual anatomical learning and endoscopic simulator training

“…During the 17 th century, the first wax models of human anatomy were created (Chen et al, 1999), to support the study of anatomy by providing a visual and spatial source of anatomical information both more accessible and less susceptible to putrefaction than actual dead bodies. The medical curriculum reform in the wake of the French revolution made it common practice for medical students to perform their own dissections (Weiner and Sauter, 2003); this came to be known as the Paris school, whose influence spread rapidly to other countries. By then, the essentially modern situation of anatomical learning through dissection, supported by anatomical atlases and 3D models was in place.…”

From accouchement to agony1: a lexicological analysis of words of French origin in the modern English language of medicine

“…48 The French physicians of the time also played a unique role in shaping the language of clinical medicine. "New methods such as percussion, mediate auscultation, and psychological evaluation were introduced, and autopsies became routine" [Weiner & Sauter 2003]. René Laënnec (1781-1826), who practised medicine in Paris, invented a simple instrument that he coined stéthoscope (mod.…”