« Forming a Christian medical elite »

The Laennec Conference in Paris in the 30s

Abstract

The Laennec Conference was constituted in the 1930s as a place of training deliberately oriented towards a Christian medical elite, whose knowledge would allow to establish an authority and an influence participating in the re-establishment of “a Christian social order” ; a place of sociability based on a highly integrated moral community, realizing the beginnings of a medical corporation; a place of debates, which had become a sign of contradiction in French society and in the Catholic Church, by trying to define a new order for medicine through the promotion of “medical humanism” and the definition of “Catholic doctor” from the thematization of many cases of conscience.