Le développement paradoxal de l’anatomie et de la chimie dans un sanctuaire de la botanique : le Jardin royal des plantes médicinales

The ‘Jardin du roi’, the king’s garden was founded in 1635 for the cultivation of medicinal plants indigenous to France and to acclimatise plants imported from abroad. The garden was also used for the teaching of different branches of botany. From the 1670s, however, lessons belonging to other disciplines, associated like botany with the ‘healing arts’, that is to say anatomy and surgery. These were practical lessons and the fact that they were free and were delivered in French and not Latin, along with the qualities of the earliest professors, soon raised the king’s garden to a leading position in France, even in Europe, for medical and surgical teaching. This success is also to be explained by the weaknesses of the traditional teaching institutions, the faculty of medicine and the college of surgeons. This was the context in which the first anatomical amphitheatre was constructed in 1705-1710, followed by a more grandiose building designed in 1787 by Edme Verniquet, at the initiative of the garden’s intendant, Buffon. This amphitheatre was rearranged and enlarged in 1794-1795 by Jacques Molinos and it was here, in January 1795 that the first session of the ‘Ecole normale’ took place, soon to become the ‘Ecole normale supérieure’