Faculty of Biology and Medicine
The history of medicine in the canton of Vaud goes back much further than the history of the university of the same name. The first hospital, that of Saint-Jean, dates from 1177, followed by that of Saint-Nicolas around 1190 and that of Jorat (Saint-Catherine) in 1228. In 1279, the Notre-Dame hospital was opened, founded by the church at the top of the rue de la Mercerie [1]. Rebuilt in the 15th century, it was completely rebuilt in the mid-18th century. Its operating principle, which is quite similar to the way we think of hospitals today, was maintained from 1300 to 1800. The Hospitale pauperum took in beggars, delinquents, the poor, pilgrims and sometimes the sick. Hôpital, hospice and hôtel come from the same Latin word, hospes, the hôte, which is also the origin of the word hospitalité. It's easy to see why. Outside the city, Lausanne also had a sick clinic for contagious diseases, mainly leprosy and plague, which gave its name to the district. The Saint-Lazare chapel on the lakeside, close to the Roman museum, is today the only remaining monument of the medieval hospitals.
The chapel was built in the 18th century, and is still in use today.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the State acquired the Citadel hospital and the Champ-de-l'Air estate, next to the Place de l'Ours. It was here that the insane were confined.
Before 1765, anyone was free to practise as a doctor in the Pays de Vaud. As early as 1765, Their Excellencies published a text setting out the legal basis for the practice of medicine. At the same time, in 1787, the Bernese government set up a supervisory body for medical affairs, the Collège de médecine de Lausanne. Its vice-president was Samuel-Auguste Tissot. He is one of Lausanne's great medical luminaries. A citizen of Grancy and nicknamed the "physician of princes and prince of physicians", Tissot, like Matthias Mayor, left his mark on nineteenth-century Lausanne surgery at the end of the seventeenth century. Thanks to his work on onanism and pilepsy, he was the first doctor to be called upon to teach at the Academy, as an honorary professor from 1766 to 1797. Frédéric Recordon and William Haldimand founded the Asile des aveugles in 1843. Aimé Steinlen founded the Children's Hospice in 1861. It was the son-in-law of Louis Germond, the creator of the Saint-Loup institution, who produced these thousands of practically bénévoles, visiting or hospice nuns, recognisable à their little tuyauté bonnet, typical of the bourgeois costume of the Echallens region in the middle of the 19th century.
It was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that the hospital's role as a public hospital was transformed into that of a nursing home; This was thanks in particular to two significant developments, the construction of the Asile d'aliénés de Cery in 1873 and that of the Hôpital cantonal du Calvaire (Bugnon) ten years later. In 1887, Emile Dind, Jacques Larguier des Bancels and Edouard de Cérenville, the head physician at the cantonal hospital, set up the Pépinet Central Dispensary. It was to become the University Polyclinic in 1892.
In 1804 François Verdeil, then head of the Vaud Health Office, asked the Government to create a medical school. The initiative is ready to go ahead, as the canton is struggling to cope with the financial burdens associated with the current dependency situation. Nevertheless, the 1806 Law on Public Education created two professorships, one in medicine and the other in surgery. They were not put up for competition until 1812, and the two candidates who applied submitted a composition in Latin that was judged inadequate and a paper in French that was inadmissible. There was no further mention of these chairs, which disappeared even in the next law, that of 1837. Mathias Mayor, founder of the Societé vaudoise des sciences médicales, was awarded an honorary professorship in medicine at the Faculté des lettres et des sciences from 1841 to 1847. Charles Hoffmann taught legal medicine at the Faculty of Law from 1846 to 1847. Finally, Hermann Lebert, holder of a doctorate in medicine à Zurich, also taught medicine from 1859 à 1878.
The law of 1869 introduced a chair of hygiene. The Académie entrusted it to Frédéric Recordon, until then professor of legal medicine in the Faculty of Law. He was replaced in 1875 by Marc Dufour. Anatomy and physiology were taught by François Forel from 1869 à 1895.
In 1876 Geneva opened a Faculty of Medicine. Lausanne reacted by creating a medical science section in 1881 which, together with the pharmacy section and the science section, formed the Faculty of Science. The fédéral law of 1877 introduced fédéraous medical examinations.
The propédeutical section was housed in an old barracks à la Cité and took in 13 étudiants. On the eve of the creation of the Faculty of Medicine, there will be 34 students. The future doctors of Vaud now have the opportunity to begin their studies in Lausanne. They complete their studies in Berne or Geneva. The professors appointed to teach these fundamental courses were Edouard Bugnion[2] in anatomy and Alexandre Herzen[3] in physiology. From 1885 to 1886 Henri Blanc taught histology, before devoting himself to zoology and comparative anatomy. Nathan Loewenthal took over histology. Soon the old barracks became too small and, in 1888, the Section was transferred to the Caroline, in the renovated Ancienne Douane, which took the name of the School of Medicine.
The transformation of the School of Medicine into a medical school was a major step forward.
The transformation of the Academy into a University in 1890 was accompanied by the creation of a full Faculty of Medicine. 13 professors were attached to it. In the first year, 66 students, including 13 from abroad, enrolled in medicine, out of a total of 321 at the university. It was a great success, with increasing numbers of foreign students flocking to Lausanne, which had become a veritable medical Mecca. In 1905, the Faculty had 456 students, 82% of whom (377) were foreigners. It alone accounted for half of Lausanne's students and a quarter of the total number of Swiss students enrolled in medicine.
Tissot, Mayor, Recordon, Haldimand, Dufour and later Roux, Bourget, Gonin, Decker… no other academic discipline than medicine can boast of having had so many célébrités à pass à the postérité by giving their name à a Lausanne street.
Rapidly after the opening of the new faculty, relations became strained between two Russian professors, both students of Professor Moritz Shiff of the University of Geneva. They were Alexandre Herzen, who taught physiology, and Nathan Loewenthal, who taught histology. Loewenthal was highly praised by his students, but Herzen, who was undoubtedly more of a showman than a scientist, sent his colleague to the asylum in 1895, apparently for no medical reason. Poor Loewenthal spent the whole summer in Cery before finally being released shortly before classes resumed, so that histology teaching would not be left empty-handed. In order to prevent the two teachers from crossing paths, they will teach in two separate locations.
Moreover, the two teachers will be teaching in two separate locations.
The twentieth century saw regular transformations in a constantly growing Faculty of Medicine. Some of its activities were more related to public health than to higher education. In 1971, the first stone of the new Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois (CHUV) was laid, while teaching was structured into four sectors: the university (basic sciences), public health (community medicine), the hospital centre (the clinic) and the psychiatric sector. The new Vaud hospital was inaugurated in 1982.
The history of Lausanne's Faculty of Medicine underwent a profound change in 2003, when it was closed at the same time as the Faculty of Science. Teaching was reorganised. Two new faculties were created: Biology and Medicine (FBM), focusing on the "mystery of life", and Geosciences and the Environment;osciences et de l'environnement (FGSE), intended to respond to society's need for a better understanding of man's place in his environment[4].
Olivier Robert - UNIRIS 2014
Notes
[1] See the Lausanne chronology on the city of Lausanne website (www.lausanne.ch).
[2] Son of Charles, the banker who owned the Hermitage above Lausanne.
[3] Son of Alexander, a Russian revolutionary exiled to Siberia between 1835 and 1839, who had fled his country.