Replacing priests with doctors? The medicalization of education in eighteenth-century France and the question of secularization

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, the French medical field was often suspected of wanting to put the doctor in the place of the priest, and many historians have linked secularization processes in France closely to a sacralization of medicine. Thus, France lends itself as a case study to investigate when and how the medicalization of education was linked to attempts at secularization. However, instead of examining the more tangible institutional secularization of education in the nineteenth century, this chapter problematizes the rather nebulous narrative of an ideological secularization of education through medicine in the second half of the eighteenth century, when medical reasoning became increasingly relevant in political, philosophical, and educational debates. First, selected medical treatises are used to trace the early ‘medicalization of education’ in the knowledge production of French physicians from the middle of the eighteenth century. Secondly, to challenge simplified ideological oppositions of religion and medicine, intersections of educational, medical, and theological reasoning in these texts are elucidated and connected to theological arguments that preceded them. Finally, I suggest that when medical knowledge was put in the ideological service of the anticlerical wing of the French Enlightenment, it came to be associated with opposition to religion and the Catholic Church.