HEALTH WARS: Making and Breaking Medical Authority, 1730-1820
Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, Mémoire sur l’électricité
Eighteenth-century France is famous for its robust public sphere, with an increasingly confident and critical public reading a dizzying number of books and news sources. Medical practitioners jumped into this fray with zeal, eager to reach a broad audience. Yet they were frustrated to often find themselves ignored or attacked, even accused of charlatanism. They had credentials and specialized knowledge, but that wasn’t enough: they also had to establish their authority and capture attention.
Practitioners told new stories in an effort to navigate this thicket. They styled themselves as heroes fighting against illness and ignorance. They published sensationalist stories to compete in a crowded print marketplace, even as they railed against those they deemed quacks. They tested cures on orphans to make their advice more persuasive to privileged patients. These battles over medical authority – or what I am calling eighteenth-century “Health Wars”— explain why medical authority is unstable and why efforts to guide public health are so often fraught.
These battles were gendered and racialized. Practitioners experimented with different brands of masculinity: suave and worldly physicians, brave colonial practitioners who had suffered to acquire their knowledge and experience, combative surgeons ever ready to defend their turf, solicitous male midwives. Moreover, French practitioners published lurid stories that pathologized blackness and implicitly highlighted their whiteness as evidence of their authority. Medical media engagement did not simply reflect changing ideas of race and gender; it actively shaped them.
“Health Wars” explores a series of interlocking case studies that stretch over the long eighteenth century and move from Rouen to Mauritius, Strasbourg to Saint-Domingue. Together, they demonstrate the central place of medicine in the eighteenth-century public sphere and the intertwined histories of Enlightenment and empire.
“Les médecins botaniste et minéralogiste écrasés par le médecin à la mode.”