Citation: Stahnisch, Frank W. 2024. The Hospital as a Beacon of Science? Parisian Academic Medicine around 1800. Histories 4: 369–393. https:// doi.org/10.3390/histories4030018 Academic Editor: Francesco Perono Cacciafoco Received: 3 July 2024 Revised: 30 July 2024 Accepted: 27 August 2024 Published: 4 September 2024 Copyright: © 2024 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Article The Hospital as a Beacon of Science? Parisian Academic Medicine around 1800 Frank W. Stahnisch 1,2 1 Department of History, Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences Bldg. 606, University of Calgary, University Drive NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada; fwstahni@ucalgary.ca; Tel.: +1-403-210-6290 2 Alberta Medical Foundation/Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine and Health Care, Cumming School of Medicine, Hospital Drive NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada Abstract: Owing to medical historian Erwin H. Ackerknecht’s (1906–1988) pioneering study “Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794–1848” (1967), the year 1794 is seen as the decisive separation date on which the development and reorganization of the Parisian clinical school—as a broad movement and a system of medical education and clinical practice—distanced it from the traditions of the 18th century. This precise dating is based on the “Rapport et projet de décret sur l’établissement d’une École centrale de Santéà Paris” (1794) by the French clinician and naturalist Antoine-François Fourcroy (1755–1809), which appeared five years after the French Revolution. Fourcroy was asked by the Conseil d’État to submit a detailed report in which he was obliged to comment on the existing health situation and the state of medical care and research. His report thereby ventured so far as to request the continued dissolution of all medical faculties in France, as these institutions were seen as counter-revolutionary hotbeds in the wider educational landscape of the Grande Nation. Fourcroy’s recommendations were implemented a short time later; he had recommended that medical training should be established again in the traditional locations of Paris, Montpellier, and Strasbourg in France yet in the different settings of so-called health schools, Écoles de Santé. In this article, I look at the corresponding training and care structures after the French Revolution, as well as some of the specific reasons which led to the complete suspension of teaching in academic medicine at the time. In the more recent research literature, Ackerknecht’s view has undergone some modifications, whereby the fixation on the date 1794 has been challenged since the French traditions of the royalistic period have hardly been considered. Furthermore, it has been argued that the reorganization of medicine during the time of the Empire remained largely based on knowledge structures derived from the previous 18th century. In order to keep the complex scientific, institutional, and socio-economic conditions of the context of Parisian Academic Medicine aligned, I first explore some developments up to the time of the French Revolution (1789), before assessing the implications of the reform of knowledge structures and curricular programs instigated since the 1790s, as these remain relevant to medical history in the 19th century. Keywords: French history; the French Revolution; history of medicine; knowledge systems; medical education; the Parisian Clinic; reform curricula 1. Introduction In 1991, the American medical anthropologist Fred W. Hafferty coined the term “am- biguous man” to describe an epistemic view of the human body as representing both an individual and social subject and that of an object exposed to medical research and unrestrained volition. On the one hand, Hafferty drew attention to the human body’s vulnerability while emphasizing its capacity to pass on diseases that naturally had to be considered. This view necessarily shortens the scope of doctors’ clinical and epistemic per- spectives in medicine. On the other hand, he pointed out that a human being’s personality was ultimately connected to subjective perception, along with the individual and social Histories 2024, 4, 369–393. https://doi.org/10.3390/histories4030018 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/histories