Seasons Of The French Revolutionary Calendar

#Seasons Of The French Revolutionary Calendar Professional Status And

2 The adoption of the general term officier de santГ© (literally вЂњhealth officerвЂќ) to denote all those practising medicine at the time provides a particularly interesting example, which has never been properly studied. 1 One feature which has received some attention is the concomitant change in language. It affected all aspects of society including medicine. The endings of the names are grouped by season.The revolutionary period in France was a time of great turmoil. The French Republican Calendar or French Revolutionary Calendar is a calendar proposed during the French. Bengal Industries And The British Industrial Revolution (1757-1857) (Routledge Explorations In Economic History) Indrajit Ray, Bengal Industries And The British Industrial Revolution (1757-1857) (Routledge Explorations In Economic History) Indrajit Ray, Royal Tour Of France By Charles IX And Catherine De Medici: Festivals And Entries, 1564-66 W.McAllister Johnson, Introduction To Physiological.

We shall see that the democratization of language extended to several aspects of medicine. Most famously, the respectful bourgeois titles of Monsieur/Madame were replaced by the universal citoyen/citoyenne. One way of dissociating the new order from the ancien rГ©gime was to make certain words and names taboo. There were many attempts to create a new and better world simply by changing the vocabulary. The notion that the calendar was devised by and for farmers so that they would know when to sow and when to reap has been taken for granted too long it fails both the test of logic and of fact.Language is always important in shaping the social construction of reality and the Revolution illustrates this thesis particularly well. 3French Calendar Reform: The De-Christianization of France By eLaine Vornholt Laura Lee Vornholt-Jones Calendars are and always have been religious devices.

On the one hand it was associated with privilege, book learning as opposed to practical skills, and the use of Latin and esoteric terminology. The abandonment of the term mГ©decine had both negative and positive aspects. The most fundamental words relating to the treatment of disease, both as applied to the subject, la mГ©decine, and the practitioner, le mГ©decin, were no longer acceptable.

Seasons Of The French Revolutionary Calendar Professional Status And

In the new democratic age a title was sought that could be applied equally to all medical practitioners, thus abolishing the traditional superior position of the physician. Whether that of the Church, civil society, or the rhythms of the seasons.In addition to questions of professional status and education there was the political dimension. 7 By the time of the Revolution, therefore, the status of the more eminent French surgeons was probably rather higher than that of their British counterparts.The French Republican Calendar was perhaps the boldest of all the reforms. 6 In many respects the status of the surgeon, or at least of many leading surgeons in towns like Paris, had risen during the course of the century.

At the same time it considers political influences on the control of medical practice.To put the issue in its historical context, two major instances of systematic linguistic change in the revolutionary period will be studied before the medical dimension is discussed in more detail. This article is, therefore, largely concerned with the influence of language on the unification of the profession. This was soon to be reinforced by the argument of Antoine-FranГ§ois Fourcroy (1755вЂ“1809) in 1794 that the physician and surgeon should receive a common training, more practical in nature than physicians had undergone previously.

In his report to the Convention, the mathematician Gilbert Romme (1750вЂ“95) argued that both the number of days in the traditional week with its Sabbath and the names of the months were founded on superstition and should be changed. 8 By 1792 the Academy was involved in the establishment of a systematic nomenclature for the proposed new measures of the metric system, with new terms such as вЂњmetreвЂќ and вЂњkilogramвЂќ.The foundation of the Republic in September 1792 seemed to many revolutionaries to mark the beginning of a new era in the history of the human race and, following the moves to establish a new system of weights and measures, it was proposed that there should also be a new calendar. In May 1790 the National Assembly urged such a reform, which was to be undertaken by a commission of the Paris Academy of Sciences.

The circumlocution l'art de guГ©rir (the healing art), already with some currency under the old regime, became the acceptable replacement for the term mГ©decine, now considered Г©litist. (Complementing many hospitals ( hГґtels Dieu) of religious foundation were large hГґpitaux gГ©nГ©raux, essentially workhouses set up by the state.) Thus the famous Paris HГґtel Dieu became the Hospice de l'HumanitГ©, and the CharitГ©, founded by the Brothers of Charity, became the Hospice de l'UnitГ©. Louis St Just stated that вЂњthe words вЂalmsвЂ™ and вЂhospitalвЂ™ must be erased from the revolutionary vocabularyвЂќ, 15 and this was duly done, with hГґpital being replaced for a short time by hospice. In addition, the concept of charity and the giving of alms was alien to the new republic, and so, by association, were the many hospitals that had been founded on principles of Christian charity. 14Another academic term, вЂњ facultГ©вЂќ was also considered redolent of privilege and even corruption (particularly in relation to some of the more venal provincial faculties of medicine, such as that of Orange, in the final years of the ancien rГ©gime), and the term was dropped, although it was still permissible to speak of a вЂњschoolвЂќ ( Г©cole). 13 When a largely disorganized medical profession tried to unite in 1796 in the SociГ©tГ© de SantГ©, they too claimed protection as a sociГ©tГ© libre under the constitution.

One was the positive emphasis on health. 19 It is important to make a distinction between that later usage and the very different meaning of the term in the revolutionary period, which is the main subject of this paper.The revolutionary title officier de santГ© had several implications. 18 Unfortunately, in the nineteenth-century this same term was often applied to provincial medical practitioners with inferior qualifications. 16Against this background 17 we are in a better position to understand the replacement of the designation mГ©decin by that of вЂњ officier de santГ©вЂќ.

21 This situation was to come to a head in November 1794 with Fourcroy's proposal for a common education for physicians and surgeons on the principle that вЂњmedicine and surgery are two branches of the same scienceвЂќ, 22 but the idea actually originated earlier. 20 Right up to the Revolution, if a surgeon wrote a thesis to become MaГ®tre en chirurgie, he had to submit it to a board under the partial control of the Faculty of Medicine. The dominance of the physician over the surgeon had not only been mentioned in the great eighteenth-century EncyclopГ©die, but one article had gone so far as to support the legitimacy of the permanent subordination of the surgeon to the physician, a subordination which, it claimed, was вЂњfounded on the nature of things and on the very subject of their studiesвЂќ.

Once war was declared, in April 1792, surgeons were to prove themselves on the battlefield, again at the expense of the physicians. 24 The members of the College were doing no more than expressing the widely felt sentiment that in skill and in medical effectiveness surgeons were at least the equal of physicians. We would like the very names of physician and surgeon to be suppressed and a common expression substituted for them, which will efface even the memory of the words which has marked this injustice. 23 In 1791 the College of Surgery at Nantes had argued that surgery deserved equal status with medicine and the two separate names should be abandoned in favour of a common term applicable equally to both:We would like the two branches to form a single unity, subject to the same laws, to the same regime (which we will share according to our talents), to the same positions and the same rights in society.

As early as August 1790 the SociГ©tГ© de MГ©decine was to hear complaints about growing вЂњconfusion between medicine, surgery and even pharmacyвЂќ.