French Medicine

Two French Pioneer Historians of Indian Medicine

This text constitutes a summary of the author's recent book on Gustave Lietard (1833 - 1904) and Palmyr Cordier (1871 - 1914), the first historians of Ayurveda in France. In this book, their writings are reprinted and analysed in a long introduction of Ayurvedic historiography.

Sir William Osler and French medicine.

'ONLY those of us, Mr. President, who have had the good fortune to hold the distinguished position which, by your kind grace, Sir, I hold today, only those who have delivered the Oslerian oration, can appreciate the extraordinary difficulties besetting a subject, every aspect of which has been considered, very often too, by men who have brought to the task a combination of learning and literary...

The embodied soul in seventeenth-century French medicine.

While medical historians have noted the continuing importance of the soul in seventeenth-century physiology, it is not generally recognized that there were systematic discussions of the role of the physiological soul even after it was banished from science by Descartes and Malebranche. In this paper I analyze important accounts of it by founding members of the Academie des Sciences who were phy...

The geographical imperative in nineteenth-century French medicine.

Medical geography was an abiding but at times peripheral concern of the medical art in nineteenth-century France. This article reviews selected works of the major medical geographers and examines the conditions of their emergence. Only mildly concerned with the values of cartographic precision, the article lays a foundation for future investigations into the subliminal geography of the medical ...

Criminocorpus: Browsing through the French History of Crime and Medicine