Fashioning a Role for Medicine: Alexandre-Louis-Paul Blanchet and the Care of the Deaf in Mid-nineteenth-century France

In the late eighteenth century, medicine was not part of the institutional approach to ‘deaf-mutes’ in the Western world: it was teachers rather than doctors who could claim competence for their care. Yet by the second half of the nineteenth century, doctors had supplanted teachers in this role, despite having made no major therapeutic contributions. The change proceeded via a series of crises in which specialists confronted each other on professional and disciplinary grounds. How did doctors position themselves in their dialogue with educators? How did they construct their own identity within a discipline dominated by teachers? How did they secure the support of the state and of deaf people themselves? How did they announce and consolidate their presence within a field of forces? This article illuminates the strategies pursued in the production and reception of medical knowledge, by examining the controversies around Parisian physician Alexandre Blanchet during the mid-nineteenth century.