Rationality and Control in French Eighteenth-Century Medical Views of the Peasantry

Abstract

The eighteenth-century medical view of the peasantry offers clues to a series of problems. This essay will treat one of them, namely the processes by which the French medical community in the declining years of theancien régimeand the early years of the Revolutionary period came to justify proposals for intervention in a rural society generally hostile to its claims and suspicious of its motives. The theme of the present study is an exploration of how the ideology of rationality and control, which was being developed in the learned world of the eighteenth century, was reinforced by a group within it that was gaining prestige and searching for means to enhance its professional status and power.Since the demands of such an inquiry are rather large, many of the related questions which it raises, such as the nature of medical knowledge, the contemporary disputes in medical philosophy, and the movement of change from one form of medicine to another, will be touched on only insofar as they have direct relevance to the major need to clarify the medical contribution to the development of the new ideology. In my present conceptualization of the problem, I am concerned to show that there was a close interaction between medical knowledge and the social values of the members of the medical trade, even if there existed no conscious direction of the elements connecting the two, and in spite of the difficulties there are in establishing the precise links mediating intellectual products and their social configurations.