La médecine néo-hippocratique des années 1930 : le temps d’une rencontre

The 1930s neo-hippocratism movement materialized with the organisation of the first International Congress of neo-hippocratic Medicine in Paris in July 1937. This congress staged the meeting of faculty professors, who in this respect were part of the academic medicine of their time, with homeopathic doctors, who tend to be historiographically perceived as practitioners of « alternative medicines ». All these doctors agreed on a synthetic medicine that took into account the complexity of the human personality and its many relationships with its environment. This claim can be understood as a response to the developments of laboratory medicine, often considered too reductionist. A detailed analysis of homeopathic medicine’s internal evolutions, which led to this meeting, allows us to discuss the dichotomy between academic medicine and alternative medicine and to argue for the study of alternative medicines through their doctrinal specificities, in relation to medical holism, rather than through their relations with academic medicine.