[Surgeons and the spirit of surgery in France during the 18th century]

In less than a century, French surgery changed completely by ceasing to be an uncertain technique practised by routine practitioners and becoming a scientific discipline. This transformation involves the 4 following aspects: 1. The surgeon becomes an anatomist, a scientist, a clinician and a pathologist. 2. New structures and new teaching methods are adopted. 3. The separation between medicine and surgery progressively decreases; if not structurally at least in fact, surgery becomes associated to medicine. 4. Surgery takes a prominent place in the private life of the French. In the light of these facts, it could be said that surgery has developed medicine to a point where it raises new hopes for the scientific world and gains the support and esteem of the public at the end of the XVIIIth century.