AMERICAN PHYSICIANS AND FRENCH MEDICINE--1815-1890

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The proposed project will examine the relationship between American physicians and French medicine between 1815 and 1890. In the wake of the French Revolution, Paris emerged as a center unmatched in its medical vitality, and boasted such innovations as tissue pathology, the stethoscope, clinical statistics, systematic clinical instruction, and the anatomo-clinical viewpoint. After Waterloo and peace, the Paris hospitals became a mecca for foreign medical students and practitioners, including some 700 from the United States who studied there before the American Civil War. The knowledge and technique these migrants brought back were leading components in the transformation of American medicine during the antebellum period. This study, which uses the methods of intellectual and social history to evaluate published and manuscript documents, will assess the French impulse in American medicine by addressing several interrelated questions: 1) Why did American physicians go to Paris, and what do their motivations reveal about the deficiencies and strengths of American medicine? 2) What criteria determined which aspects of French medicine they chose to take up or eschew? How can their selectivity in Paris--contrasted with the often different choices made by English visitors--clarify the singularity of american doctors' values, assumptions, aspirations, and self-perceptions? 3) How did they seek to express the commitments developed in Paris after they returned home, and how did American society shape their endeavors? Did French medicine take on a different meaning in the American context? 4) How did Paris-returned Americans transmit French medicine to their profession at large, and how did those who had remained at home perceive and evaluate French medical ways? 5) How did American attitudes toward French medicine change after the Civil War with the ascendancy of German medicine, and how did Paris-trained American s try to keep alive the memory of the Paris Clinical School and its significance? The resulting book will both assess the French impulse in the 19th-century American medicine and use the American response to French medicine to display the values, needs, and expectations of American medical culture.