| The rise of bacteriology is one of the most celebrated phenomenon in medical historiography. Historian's approaches taken to address the issue since the turn of the twentieth century were gradually modified to pass, most often, from an endogenous interpretation of scientific development, where medical concepts, theories, and methods are seen as developing in isolation from the social context in which they occur, to the opposite, sociological approach, where every element of the medical-scientific enterprise is rather seen as being influenced by its context in an interaction by which the public, governmental and professional instances involved in medicalization, forming an impassive dynamic, change the course of every aspect of medical history. But beyond the professional elements, is the development of medical and scientific thought invariably subjugated to this social dynamic? Could not the ideal of scientificity advocated by doctors, forging an archetype in which professional rigor is meant to be isolated from these extrinsic factors, confer to the medical and scientific endeavor a genuine stability towards fluctuations in the sociopolitical and professional environment in which they evolve?;Our study addresses these questions by the exhaustive analysis of the discourse defined by the Quebec medical journals between 1840 and 1880. It is based on two new developments, one that presents the methodological foundations of the audit---that is to say, the definition of the medical archetype, its role in professional recognition, the scientific criteria that it determines, and a typology of discourse that can be inferred from it---and the other, the results. The study shows that the archetype described by the Quebec medical profession, far from being solely a discursive tool by which the profession has been socially recognized in the nineteenth century, exerted a decisive influence on the formation of the professional attitude towards etiological novelties presented by the pioneers of bacteriology. Thus, in addition to revealing the exact framework of the development of causal thinking in Quebec, the thesis shows the complementarity of internal and external approaches to medical historiography. It contributes to a fairer representation of the processes at work in scientific development. |
