206 Numbers
philosophising” in place of “the wild and visionary hypotheses which
disgraced the science of the preceding centuries.”^22MEDICAL SCIENCE COMES OF AGE
Despite the growing confl ation of medicine and science in the eighteenth
century, some historians have insisted that the “birth” of scientifi c med-
icine—in Paris—did not occur until the last years of the century. Michel
Foucault argued that medicine did not make “its appearance as a clinical
science” until the birth of the clinic in the 1790s. Laurence Brockliss and
Colin Jones have asserted that “medical science came of age” at the turn of
the nineteenth century when “the newly established écoles de santé turned
the discipline [of medicine] into a fully fl edged empirical science.”^23 In the
years after the Revolution, French physicians increasingly hobnobbed
with men of science, and cutting- edge medicine shifted gradually from
the domestic bedside to the hospital and the laboratory. Inspired by the
investigations of the brilliant young physician Xavier Bichat, the study of
pathology fl ourished in Paris laboratories, and the techniques developed
there quickly became “the touchstone of a new medical science,” not only
in France but throughout Europe.^24 On the heels of Bichat’s pathological
initiative Pierre Louis developed a quantitative method to test the effi -
cacy of such practices as bloodletting. With the triumph of the numerical
method, he declared in 1835, “We shall hear no more of medical tact, of
a kind of divining power of physicians. No treatise whatsoever will con-
tinue to be the sole development of an idea, or a romance; but an analysis
of a more or less extensive series of exact, detailed facts; to the end that
answers may be furnished to all possible questions: and then, and not
till then, can therapeutics become a science.” Speaking two years later as
president of the Société Médicale d’Observation, Louis described medicine
as being entirely “a science of observation.”^25
Not all of Louis’s colleagues approved of his efforts to construct a
science of medicine based on quantifi cation. Among the naysayers was
T. C. E. Auber, who argued that medicine had “a much greater analogy
with the moral, metaphysical, religious, and political sciences” than it
did with “the physical, chemical, and mathematical sciences.” Largely
because of the “prodigious variation that created diffi culties in the physi-
ological sciences,” another physician- critic, François Double, professed to
see “no similarity” between medicine and the physical sciences. The posi-
tivist philosopher Auguste Comte scorned the notion of basing clinical
decisions on empirically derived numerical calculations.^26