[Savages]

Francois Boissier Sauvages de la Croix (1706-1769) introduced in medical classification a naturalistic modality founded on orders, genders and species which was a model for Linneus. A former poet and polemist, the great thinker - a leader of the Montpellier School - devoted himself to the writing of a Nosologia for students. In the prolegonema of this Grand Oeuvre, we can find the development of a rigourous rationalistic epistemology based on systematicity, of a modern pre-structuralist and pre-positivist nature, while the clinician and practionner was fixed to a neohippoctatic and finalistic-animist mentality. The accent is put upon this astonishing contrast.