The Rhetoric of Hippocrates at the Paris School

So wrote Louis Peisse, the medical journalist, frequent contributor to the Gazette médicale de Paris, and member of the Academy of Medicine, in his 1857 book, La médecine et les médecins, while discussing the recent debate in the Academy over organicism and vitalism.2 Peisse compared the Hippocratic writings to the Bible, claiming that all the medical sects used Hippocratic texts as freely as religious sects used the Bible. He went on to say that, since in medicine there was no superior authority to interpret the texts and fix the dogmas, each could use Hippocrates to his own advantage. For Peisse, Parisian physicians used Hippocrates to justify any position whatsoever.