Abstract
SUMMARY. — In the second half of the 18th century, medical popularization spread so that many hand health dictionaries were published in order to allow patients and their relations to behave judiciously, while waiting for the physician's arrival or even to replace him. The double, somewhat contradictory purpose, to provide an increasing medical professionalization against quackery, and to bring medical knowledge within everybody's reach, involves a rather complex textual strategy, taking into account the health dictionaries' users. In this paper, the rhetorical means are scrutinized as well as the different kinds of reduction of medical knowledge that any medical popularization brings with it: selection of information, simplification, silences, practical advice about the results of the drugs rather than explanations. However, this analysis reveals that the division between scientific litterature for specialists and popularization became confused, and that the real distinction is between the medical elites, who can have a critical and philosophical view of their art, and the others.
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