Medical Societies and Scientific Culture in Nineteenth-Century Belgium

This book offers the first comprehensive study of nineteenth-century medical societies as scientific institutions. It analyses how medical men gathered to share, discuss, evaluate, publish and even celebrate their studies. When physicians met in medical societies, they engaged in a community with specific practices, rules and manners. This book studies these practices and reveals the formal and subtle ways in which shared norms were set. The book reveals the publishing procedures of medical journals, the tradition of oratory in academies, the networks of anatomists, the construction of ‘expertise’ in public health and the commemoration of famous physicians such as Andreas Vesalius and Joseph Guislain.

The focus of this study is nineteenth-century Belgium, a young liberal state desirous to take its place among the European nations. Belgian physicians eagerly made use of the country’s constitutional freedoms of press and association. By setting up medical societies and publishing journals, they participated in a civil society shaped by the values of social engagement, polite debate and a free press of an upcoming urban bourgeoisie. In the second half of the century, a new class of professional scientists ended this tradition of ‘civil’ science. Medical societies, in turn, took up new functions as mediators between specialties and as centres of postgraduate education.

This book addresses the complex relation between science, sociability and citizenship in the nineteenth century. It will be of interest to cultural historians of science and medicine, and to all those seeking to understand the position of science in nineteenth-century society.