In the first quater of the 19e Century, the Europe appears hardly from four centuries of horror. The sanitary state of the country is absolutely pitiful. The big epidemics, vectors of which we still ignore, constitute the obsession of the starving populations. The cholera, the plague or the smallpox appear regularly and without preventing, on the heels of armies in the field, everywhere where pile up the hollow stomachs. The already considerable poverty, is going to deteriorate because of the urbanization and of the industrialization. A massive drift from the land pulls thousands of families discouraged in the most unhealthy districts of the big cities. This proletariat benefits from no material help. There is then no hygiene, no water conveyance or of sewers, no structure of medical and social mutual aid. Let us dream that in this period, a child on five is abandoned by his parents! In these conditions, it is not surprising that the infectious diseases made devastation.
It is only from 1870 when Western Europe was considered shielded from the plague: if it makes deaths in Paris and Marseille in 1920, the last big epidemic already dates 1720 (Marseille). The cholera is in France from 1830 till 1884: 13,000 deaths in Paris for only year of 1832 (Pasteur is ten years old), 20,000 in 1849 while Pasteur works on crystals. The country will be cleared only in 1884. Let us note that these two diseases declined without vaccines. But there is also a tuberculosis, which between 1830 and 1880 will make more victims than the cholera; The syphilis, the very wide-spread sexually transmitted disease in Europe from the 16th century; The malaria, which in 19th century is still endemic in France; And of course, the smallpox, still unchecked in spite of the vaccination of Jenner. To overcome these "God's plagues" would thus constitute an immense scientific victory, because the Church was able nothing to make there!
Scientific but also political and social Victoire, because the last century is a period particularly disturbed on these two backgrounds. France is torn between the Empire and the restored monarchy, again the Empire and finally the difficult return in a republic eager to base its legitimacy. There will be the riots of 1830 and 1848, then the war of 1870, the military collapse, with for consequence an aggravated nationalism which is going to have to let off stream on grounds of battle others than servicemen, in particular the scientific rivalries. It will be the case with German Liebig for the fermentations and German Koch for the infectious diseases. For the young republic, the new Lights of the scientism constitute the best support of the secularism, under reserve however of an early conditioning of the masses. The principle of the "free and compulsory" school is generalized by Jules Ferry in the 1880s. Which is the objective of this education in which nobody can escape, otherwise " to inculcate to all the citizens the values of the dominant elites, in particular that of the faith in the scientific and technical progress" (Ref 9).
It is by this way that will be set up diverse civic obligations, as the vaccinal obligation, which locks any individual creativity in the yoke of rules and habits which it would be improper to question. "Poured into the mould of the industrial society, designed at the same time to answer its technical needs and to assure the reproduction of its social connections, the school conveyed its standards and its values: a sense of the national solidarity often pushed until the chauvinism; a respect for institutions and for civil and military elites, which populated them; Once in the progress and in the science. More profoundly, it worked in the broadcasting of its way of thinking: Taste of the precision and the exactness, but also intellectual rigidity and love of the formalism, the linear and mechanistic reasoning. In brief, it privileged sharply the qualities of order and method to the detriment of the creative faculties, which, we know it since, do not put on the same intellectual zones" (Ref 9).
The same reflection brings the philosopher Krishnamurti to write: "if we were educated only to be people of the sciences, academics plunged into volumes, or specialists of miscellaneous knowledge, we contribute to the destruction and to the poverty of the world as long as the education will not cultivate a complete view of the life, it will have only not enough value". The school "encourage to conform to some model", what is absurd because "the ignoramus is not the one who misses learning, but the one who does not know himself, (who does not have) the perception of the totality of its own psychological process" (Ref 9). In the heart of our current preoccupations, the failures of the education are to be put in parallel with those of the scientific medicine, because they recover from the same doctrinal bases. It is not surprising that a paternalistic system, a negative of the feminine values, favored the emergence of a medicine technician incapable to establish a link with the subjective lived of the patient. The analphabetism and the immunosuppression are both faces of the same reality: to sick society, sick medicine!
From then on, all 19th century will be filled with the confrontation of the "vitalisme" and with a hard-line materialism to lead. The vitalisme is a philosophic doctrine which stipulates that the demonstrations of the soul and the body, or if we prefer of the psyche and the soma, are determined "from the outside" by a "vital principle", mostly likened to a transcendent divinity, later reconceptualised in the "that" of the psychoanalysts. In the time which occupies us, the ideas of Pasteur or Darwin are going to serve the cause of a determinedly atheistic rationalism, become today a real scientific obscurantism...
;)
