Documenting Clinical Practice – LAENNEC

The LAENNEC project aims at re-evaluating the history of our modern medical gaze and its emergence by focusing on the third paradigm that was highlighted by Michel Foucault (Naissance de la clinique, 1963), clinical medicine and pathological anatomy. This reassessment is based on an exceptional collection of archives (several thousand manuscript sheets), which is a direct testimony of the clinical practice and intellectual work of R.T.H. Laennec (1781-1826), inventor of “auscultation mediate”. The study of this collection will serve as a pivot and starting point for a global reflection on issues related to the documentation of clinical practice, at the time when it was being organized as an institutional and academic practice. Our perspective is to report on the different purposes and strategies used in the shaping of clinical observations and knowledge, whether they aim at: compiling data in order to document clinical "history"; ensuring the transmission of a knowledge which is acquired through direct observation; establishing a reference corpus; contributing to scientific debate and controversies. An important task of the project relies on the comparison of the Laennec archives with other contemporary witnesses illustrating the various aspects of clinical practice and its documentation, a process which is not based solely on written texts and includes imaging and illustration, anatomy-pathological collections, etc. Our project brings together specialists within the fields of epistemology and philosophy of science and medicine, history of science and medicine as well as philology. It also involves the expertise of medical practitioners interested in the historical dimension of clinical practice.