Healthcare policy and advertising

The video will be available shortly.

Abstract

The fight against medical quackery in the XVIIIᵉ century inherited an ancient critical tradition, but it was part of a new context, that of the rise of a health policy at the crossroads of " noso-politics " (Michel Foucault) and the medical Enlightenment. Health became a public, and therefore political, issue. Illness is no longer just an individual issue, but the object of a health policy that combines political power and the expert discourse of doctors.

Three texts, each of a different nature, make it possible to distinguish three registers of discourse in the years 1760. The first is a judicial brief by the surgeons of Le Mans, defending their corporate privileges against the illegal practice of surgery by an executioner. The second is written by Commissaire Lemaire, who, while detailing the police policy of controlling charlatans, adopts a pragmatic and tolerant attitude in the name of the social usefulness of empiricists and their possible contribution to medical progress. The third, finally, is Samuel Tissot'sL'avis au peuple sur sa santé, which combines pedagogical ambition with enlightened paternalism, calling on the magistrate to protect a gullible and naïve people against a "  scourge " more deadly than the diseases themselves : charlatans.

In the years 1780, this rhetoric found echoes among provincial doctors, who wrote to the Société royale de médecine (SRM) to denounce local quacks, setting themselves up as an enlightened and civic-minded public and symbolically allying themselves with the Parisian learned elites. These denunciations also targeted magistrates seduced by the charlatans, exposing the contradictions inherent in enlightened paternalism. At the same time, the rise of print media (posters, libels, advertisements, medical journals) blurred the boundary between learned medicine and charlatanism : both used the same advertising media, dubious remedies were touted in learned journals, and the SRM struggled to control these flows despite the Gazette de santé, which served as a relay, and requests for censorship addressed to police lieutenant Lenoir.

The lecture thus emphasizes a double movement. On the one hand, the integration of health care into a logic of biopolitics and population government led to an intensification of the fight against charlatans, but also revealed the ambivalence of the medical Enlightenment, torn between the desire to protect and educate the population and a structural paternalism that placed doctors and the State in the position of exclusive arbiters of right and wrong in matters of health care. On the other hand, the adaptation of charlatanism to modern media space blurs the distinction between "   " and "   " doctors. Quackery ceases to be defined solely by theatricality and orality, and takes over the space of print and media enlightenment. Privileges, trade secrets, therapeutic innovation and reputational strategies are all intertwined in this new health market, to the extent that the accusation of charlatanism can also be levelled at legitimate practitioners who are too present in the press, or at promoters of spectacular remedies.

Bibliography

• Mémoire pour la communauté des chirurgiens du Mans, intimés contre Ferrey, exécuteur des sentences criminelles, Paris, Lambert, 1765.
• La Police de Paris en 1770. Mémoire inédit composé par ordre de G. de Sartine, sur la demande de Marie-Thérèse, edited by A. Gazier, in Mémoires de la Société de l'histoire de Paris et de l'Île-de-France, tome  V, Paris, 1879.
• Samuel Tissot , Avis au peuple sur sa santé, Lausanne, Zimmerli, 1761.
• Jean Verdier, La Jurisprudence de la médecine en France, Paris, Prault, 1762-1763, 2 vols.

*

• Nicole Bardiot, " Médicament et négoce à Marseille au XVIII^thsiècle ". La Mer en partage, edited by Xavier Daumalin et al, Presses universitaires de Provence, 2016, p. 227-240.
• Déborah Cohen, " Denouncing charlatans at the end of the eighteenth century: the politics of constituting a medical public ", French History, vol. 39, n° 4, 2025, p. 342-356.
• Laurent Cuvelier, La Ville captivée, Paris, Flammarion, 2024.
• Daniel Droixhe , Les Charlatans du cancer. Offre thérapeutique et presse médicale dans la France des Lumières, Paris, Hermann, 2018.
• Michel Foucault, " La politique de la santé au XVIII^thsiècle ", Les Machines à guérir. Aux origines de l'hôpital moderne, Paris, Institut de l'environnement, 1976, p. 11-21, in Dits et Écrits, tome III, p. 13-27.
• Jürgen Habermas, L'Espace public. Archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise, Paris, Payot, 1978 [1961].
• Colin Jones, " The great chain of buying: medical advertisement, the bourgeois public sphere, and the origins of the French Revolution ", American Historical Review, vol. 101, no. 1, 1996, pp. 13-40.
• Steven L. Kaplan, and Vincent Milliot. " The Paris police, a "permanent revolution" ? Du commissaire Lemaire au lieutenant de police Lenoir, les tribulations du Mémoire sur l'administration de la police (1770-1792) ", Réformer la police, edited by Catherine Denys et al, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009, p. 69-115.
• Hélène Merlin, Public et littérature en France au XVII^th  siècle, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1994.
• Céline Pauthier, L'Exercice illégal de la médecine (1673-1793). Entre défaut de droit et manière de soigner, Paris, Glyphe and Biotem, 2002.
• Séverine Pilloud , Les Mots du corps. Expérience de la maladie dans les lettres de patients à un médecin du XVIII^th  : Samuel Auguste Tissot, Lausanne, BHMS, 2013.