1220-2020 : le 800e anniversaire de l'enseignement médical universitaire dans le contexte d'une nouvelle pandémie - leçon inaugurale du congrès biennal de la SFVTT à Montpellier.

Abstract

“800 years ago, European medicine emerged from 800 years of obscurantism.” In the fifth century, the Middle Ages succeeded Antiquity. Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen sank into oblivion. From bulls to councils, scholarly medical practice will be restricted. It will not reappear until the rediscovery of Greek texts saved in Arabic and Hebrew, retranslated into Latin from the 12th Century. Then, the World was flooded with an increasingly diverse and somehow inconsistent knowledge. Medicine will be taught by particular masters independent of any system, sometimes risking charlatanism or even heresy. It was necessary to legislate and invent a method to build reliable and legitimate knowledge. On August 17, 1220, the papacy made medicine a university science, just like law and philosophy. Masters and students from Montpellier were thus the 1st to receive an official legal foundation charter as a “University of Medicine”, in the modern sense of the term: balance between political control (Church) and autonomy of scientific thought (University), between rights and duties of teachers and students, the latter being recognized for the first time as users, protected by law. It was in Montpellier, Crown of Aragon, a papal enclave in the land of Cathar heresy. The Medical University was actually a spiritual weapon and one of the 1st effective demonstrations of the “soft power”. Above all, medicine by becoming a university science bent methodically to reading, questioning, reasoning, to determine what knowledge was legitimate, the actual big issue following two years of pandemic yet.