Botanists and Medical Herbalism in Montpellier

Abstract

The article describes how the medical school in Montpellier, organized in 1498, responded to the development of the Jussiaean classification of plants. Though overshadowed by Paris in the eighteenth century as a center of medical and botanical training, botany as taught at Montpellier provided the impetus for the conversion of traditional herbalism into a biology-based medicine by the nineteenth century. In addition, the plant affinities and analogies underlying natural classification led to the conception of a viable theory of evolution, as Darwin acknowledged. The opposition to these advances, evident in the nineteenth century, remains alive today.