ABSTRACT

In 1801 a bust of Hippocrates was donated by the government of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte to the newly renovated School of Medicine in Montpellier and installed in the school’s quarters amid an elaborate ceremony.1 Some three years later, for the first time in the long history of the Montpellier medical school, students who ascended to the doctorat formally swore the Hippocratic oath.2 These two events – the first formal swearing of the Hippocratic oath and the installation of the bust of Hippocrates – are but two of many signs indicating the increased attention accorded in this period to the ‘father of medicine’ among the physicians of Montpellier, one of the most prestigious medical schools of continental Europe. Although Hippocrates had long been claimed as the source of many of Montpellier’s best-known teachings on diagnostics, prognostics, pathology and therapeutics, the eighteenth century and early years of the nineteenth witnessed an intensification of this already pronounced interest in the physician of Cos. In the complex history of the declines and revivals of Hippocrates’s reputation, this period must be regarded as one of the peaks in his prestige among European physicians – not least the physicians of Montpellier.