ABSTRACT
In this chapter we shall examine the final process by which anatomo-clinical perception finds the form of its equilibrium. If we allowed ourselves to become involved in the detail of events, it would be a long chapter indeed: for almost twenty-five years (from 1808, which saw the appearance of the Histoire des phlegmasies chroniques, to 1832, when their place was largely taken over by discussions on cholera), the theory of essential fevers and Broussais’s critique of it occupied a considerable area in medical research, more considerable, indeed, than was warranted by a problem that could be settled so quickly at the level of observation; but the sheer quantity of the polemics, the difficulty of reaching an understanding when one was in agreement as to the facts, the wide use of arguments that had little or nothing to do with pathology indicate an essential confrontation, the last (and the most violent, most complex) of the conflicts between two incompatible types of medical experience.
