François-Joseph-Victor Broussais was a French physician. Broussais’ system of “physiological medicine” rapidly became the most popular medical philosophy around Paris.
Background
François-Joseph-Victor Broussais was born on December 17, 1772, in Saint-Malo, France to the family of marine surgeon and apothecary. He spent his childhood surrounded by three women protectors: his nurse, his mother, and his grandmother.
Education
Broussais studied for some years at a college in Dinan named after him, "Collège François Broussais." During the holidays, he accompanies his father in his tours and learned the rudiments of medicine and surgery.
In 1799 he moved to Paris, where he studied under a physician, surgeon, and physiologist Xavier Bichat. In 1803 he graduated as Doctor of Medicine.
Career
After graduation, François-Joseph-Victor Broussais entered the Service de Santé Militaire, where he showed himself to be a conscientious doctor, continuously observing, writing, and teaching. His Traité des phlegmasies was written in Spain, from which he returned in 1814 to become a professor at the Val de Grâce. Broussais gave a course in practical medicine that attracted large, enthusiastic classes. His success lasted until his physiological doctrine - based in large part on therapeutic bleeding - was rejected by his students. It was also proved wrong by the 1832 outbreak of cholera, which Broussais treated, with catastrophic results, as acute gastroenteritis.
In 1834 the last number of the Annales de la médecine physiologique (which he had founded in 1822) was published, and in a last effort to regain his popularity, Broussais exploited the phrenology that Gall had made fashionable some twenty years earlier. In 1836, however, he began a type of teaching that questioned the immortality of the soul and the existence of God; it led to such violent scenes that the police were called in to restore order, and Broussais decided to leave the Val de Grâce. He became ill soon thereafter and died two years later of cancer.
The 1830 revolution had been a great boon to Broussais. Through government influence he had been exempted from the usual requirements and had won a chair at the Faculty of Medicine, a seat in the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, the rank of inspector general in the Service de Santé Militaire, and had been made a commander of the Legion of Honor.
Views
Broussais lived at a time when a monistic system of pathology was still possible. His was a kind of “Brownism” in reverse, in which the phenomena of illness are different from those of health only in intensity. Laennec and Bretonneau opposed a doctrine inspired by old theories of deep pathological states that did not admit individual illnesses, and desperately fought the idea of specificity, localization, or contagion. Everything came under the heading of gastroenteritis and consequently was treated by repeated bleedings and debilitating diets. These had disastrous effects on patients who were hemorrhaging or who suffered from cancer, malaria, or syphilis. Some have wished to see Broussais’s ideas on the nonspecific states of inflammation as making him a precursor in this field.
Nevertheless, by rejecting Pinel’s concept of essential fevers and by affirming that fevers are only reactions to certain given inflammations, Broussais eliminated the ontological notion of illness, which considered pathological and physiological phenomena to be entirely different and saw diseases as real entities, independent of the organism. But even if there had been an idea in his system, one would look in vain for a method.
Membership
In 1832 Broussais was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences.