Eighteenth-century plan showing the relations of the Paris École de Médecine to Hôtel-Dieu, the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame and the River Seine.
(Reduced copy of the cut printed in Franklin’s “La Vie Privée d’Autrefois,” 1892.)
In 1808 the Faculté de Médecine was given the splendid quarters of the Collège de l’Académie de Chirurgie, where it is still to-day located. Clinical instruction was carried on at Hôtel-Dieu, La Charité and certain other hospitals. The school itself is no longer called “l’École de Médecine,” but “la Faculté de Médecine,” and the old building, suitably modified, has been preserved—not as a part of the present school, but as a sort of clubroom or social hall for the use of all the university students. (See accompanying illustrations facing page [260].)
Écoles de Santé.—When the statement was made before the Convention that the Army of the Republic had lost about 600 medical officers, and that the troops in the eastern Pyrenees were almost entirely without physicians and surgeons, a law was passed (December 4, 1794) authorizing the organization at Paris, Montpellier and Strassburg, of three medical institutes or secondary medical schools (designated as “Écoles de Santé”). They were originally intended to be simply temporary organizations where “officiers de santé” might be trained for service in the hospitals,—more particularly the military and naval hospitals. Each of the Départements of France was entitled to send one pupil to be educated at one of these military medical schools, at the expense of the nation, for a period of three years. In accordance with this scheme Paris received 300 pupils, Montpellier 150, and Strassburg 100. Owing to the lack of places or schools where young men might, at their own expense, be trained as physicians, it soon became necessary to permit men of this class to attend these schools. And so in 1796 the Medical School at Paris was reorganized and provision made for the following twelve professorships:—
Anatomy and Physiology.
Medical Chemistry and Pharmacy.
Medical Physics and Hygiene.
Surgical Pathology.
Pathology of Internal Diseases.