ABSTRACT
Medical practice since Antiquity has never been devoid of ethical concern. The long century which began in the 1870s was marked by a paradox. In France as in most European countries, the medical profession underwent an unprecedented numerical development: limited to a few hundred of practitioners at the time of the Revolution, it numbered twenty thousand practitioners in 1890, to which 2500 health officers must be added. At the time of the Revolution, the medical trade escaped for a short time any form of control until the Imperial takeover. The frontier between therapeutics and scientific experimentation was already difficult enough to draw considering the general observation that any treatment entails specific individual risks and can therefore teach us something. In 1902, Memoires, written by a physician from Saint Petersburg and constituting a real indictment against lightly adopted medical innovations were published. The name Gerhardt Armauer Hansen made Norwegian medicine known to the entire world.
