Social hygiene in twentieth-century Britain

example. Moreover, the astringent empiricism of the Parisian clinical school and the "analytic" approach of Pinel could also, with some plausibility, be advanced as contenders for the title of "medicine of the Revolution". What gives Braunstein's claim greater weight is the recognition of the essentially polemical nature of Brousssais' system, which developed out of a series ofencounters with other strands of contemporary medical and philosophical thought. Braunstein provides, for example, a lucid account of the contrasts between Broussaism and such competing schools as the pathological anatomists, organicists, and experimental physiologists. The principal antagonist of Broussais' system, however, was the medicine and philosophy of the Restoration. This is most obvious is Broussais' polemic in De l'irritation et de lafolie against Cousin's vapid, but seductive, spiritualism. However, But Broussaism was not merely a set of texts: it was a political movement. Students of medicine, in particular, flocked to it because they saw a barely-veiled political statement in Broussais' propositions. Physiological medicine became a standard of resistance to the efforts made during the Restoration to negate the consequences of the Revolution, and to impose a new orthodoxy upon the university and ultimately upon society. Medicine bore the brunt of these attacks upon what was seen as a vicious cultural inheritance. In as much as it developed in opposition to such assaults, Broussais' system was, indeed, the medicine of the Revolution. The scope of this book goes beyond Broussais' own lifetime. In the discussion of the "heritage of Broussais", later responses to him are considered, including those ofComte and the Positivist school. As Broussais' individuality receded into the past, his name survived in the later nineteenth century as the archetypal representative of an ill-defined, but potent, complex of ideas called "Medical Materialism". One of the most informative sections of the work deals with the extent to which this outlook remained associated under the Second Empire (and, it should be added, under the Third Republic) with republican and anticlerical sentiment. Indeed, when French medical students attended the socialist International Congress of Students in Liege in 1865, they helped to forge a link between Medical Materialism and revolutions still to come.