| Summary: |
Out of the reorganization of medicine in the wake of the French Revolution,
the Paris hospitals emerged as the most vibrant center of Western medicine.
What has come to be called the Paris Clinical School is broadly identified with
a distinctive complex of institutional arrangements, clinical techniques and
teaching practices, modes of organizing knowledge, and structures of medical
perception that characterized Paris medicine between 1794 and the mid-nineteenth
century. After Waterloo and peace, Paris became a Mecca for foreign
medical students and practitioners. Between 1815 and the 1850s, some one
thousand crossed the Atlantic from the United States to study in the hospitals
and dissecting rooms of the French capital, and many times that number made
shorter journeys across the Rhine from German states and across the Channel
from Britain.
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