ABSTRACT
When Bordeu, Venel, and Barthez went up to Paris in the late 1740s and 1750s, they were determined to undermine the "ordinary" medicine of their day, and to this end they joined forces for a time with the philosophes. They went to school alongside Diderot, d'Holbach, and Rousseau at the Jardin royal. They wrote impassioned articles for the Encyclopedie. They challenged orthodoxies of official science. Bordeu in particular made a powerful impression on the Encyclopedist circle with his attacks on the physiological "castles of Spain" erected by iatromechanists. Diderot took from this association the abiding sense of affinity with Bordeu that eventuated in his creation of the fictional "Dr. Bordeu" who talked cosmology deep into the night with d' Alembert and Julie de l'Espinasse in the Reve de d'Alembert. Yet by the time Diderot placed Bordeu in his famous dialogue (written in 1769), the Montpellier physicians had long since parted company with the Encyclopedists. By the late 1760s Bordeu was ensconced in the court circle surrounding Madame du Barry, and Venel and Barthez were absorbed in the university politics of Montpellier.
