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.
