Tatsuno M, Okuda J
Department of Environmental and Preventive Medicine, School of Medicine, Osaka University.
Yakushigaku Zasshi. 1993;28(1):20-7.
The times around the French Revolution, as E. H. Ackerknecht pointed out, were especially epochmaking in that "the clinical medicine" or 'medicine in the hospital' was born and bred through the days by discarding the medicine of court physicians and the metaphysical medicine that had been dominant for centuries until then. This change is, therefore, very important from the viewpoints of sociopolitical, cultural and medical histories. The medicine practised and taught mainly in Paris in those days based politically on the newborn nationalistic centralization; technically on pathologicoanatomy and biostatistics; and conceptually on the modern medical epistemologoy that made it possible to abstract and see a 'disease' from the sick by observation, description and classification of their common signs and symptoms, and then to ignore a suffering specific to each individual patient instead. Thus those who could believe in the être (entity) of a 'disease' the clinical medicine made it 'visible' were trained for medical professionals such as modern physicians, surgeons and clinical pharmacists, which finally realized the professional monopolization of the medicine. The aim of this paper is to report and analyze the historical process how there came out the modern clinical pharmacist who was permitted by the nation as the only occupation to deal in ethical drugs in the hospital, while excluding many other people who had been treating 'traditional medicines' from the modern pharmacies of hospitals.