Introduction

Scientific developments, demographic and political concerns sparked an unprecedented period of government action concerning medical care. The nature of the resulting legislation was largely determined by a new medical union movement, promoting the professional goals of private physicians. The hybrid medical system is of course typical of most modern, capitalist nations, where modern medicine has been accompanied by the professionalization of doctors and their dominance over the practice of medicine. The relationship of physicians to the state and to society is of course critical in understanding the process of professionalization. Solidarism and its political and populationist antecedents explain the intense interest of the French state, in the period 1888-1902, in the general issue of medical reform. The keys to the promotion of the professional interests of doctors lay in two other developments: the formation of the physicians' Union movement and the Union's effective promotion of its goals in the public assistance bureaucracy.