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Revolutionary Language
The revolutionary period in France was a time of great turmoil. It affected all aspects of society including medicine. One feature which has received some attention is the concomitant change in language. The adoption of the general term officier de sante (literally "health officer") to denote all those practising medicine at the time provides a particularly interesting example, which has never been properly studied. The distinguished French historian of medicine, Jean-Charles Sournia, has said that the term deserves special attention, but he devotes no more than half a page to it.3
Language is always important in shaping the social construction of reality and the Revolution illustrates this thesis particularly well. There were many attempts to create a new and better world simply by changing the vocabulary. One way of dissociating the new order from the ancien regime was to make certain words and names taboo. Most famously, the respectful bourgeois titles of Monsieur/Madame were replaced by the universal citoyen/ citoyenne. We shall see that the democratization of language extended to several aspects of medicine. Religion, or more specifically Catholicism, could be more easily dismissed when it was described as "fanaticism" (fanatisme).4 It was not only religion, however, which was attacked as superstition. A few revolutionaries went further and described belief in doctors ("les medecins et leur art") as a kind of superstition.5
The most fundamental words relating to the treatment of disease, both as applied to the subject, la medecine, and the practitioner, le medecin, were no longer acceptable. The abandonment of the term medecine had both negative and positive aspects. On the one hand it was associated with privilege, book learning as opposed to practical skills, and the use of Latin and esoteric terminology. all these aspects had been parodied by Moliere, who created an image of the physician perhaps most justly applied to the ultra-conservative Paris Faculty of Medicine and widely believed by many people in the eighteenth century.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.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.