ABSTRACT
In the article entitled ‘Abus’ in the Dictionnaire de Médecine, Vicq d’Azyr sees the organization of a system of teaching within the hospital as the universal solution for the problems of medical training; that, for him, is the major reform to be carried out: ‘Diseases and death offer great lessons in hospitals. Are we benefiting from them? Are we writing the history of the illnesses that strike so many victims in our hospitals? Do we teach in our hospitals the art of observing and treating diseases? Have we set up any chairs of clinical medicine in our hospitals?’ [1] Yet, in a very short time, this reform of the teaching system was to assume a much wider signficance; it was recognized that it could reorganize the whole of medical knowledge and establish, in the knowledge of disease itself, unknown or forgotten, but more fundamental, more decisive forms of experience: the clinic and the clinic alone was capable of ‘reviving among the moderns the temples of Apollo and Aesculapius’ [2]. A way of teaching and saying became a way of learning and seeing.
