PROFESSIONAL MONOPOLY IN FRENCH MEDICINE

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Description: The project traces the regulation of French medical practice over a period of two centuries, from the Edit of Marly in 1707 to the Paris Congress on the Repression of Quackery in 1906. The Principal Investigator, Matthew Ramsey, sees in the French experience the establishment of the first modern professional monopoly. His project is designed to demonstrate how that monopoly was created and to explore the problems of enforcing it. He finds the turn of the nineteenth century to be seminal. France moved during the course of one generation from a traditional system of regulation by local corporations, through a period of unregulated practice during the early phases of the Revolution, and then into a bureaucratic system of state regulation beginning with Napoleon. The project will consider both the regulation of sanctioned practitioners and the campaign against irregulars. It will also discuss regulatory efforts and the reactions against them at both the national and the local levels.