This article examines two editions of British physician Christopher Meighan’s treatise on the waters of Barèges (1742 and 1764), exploring how medical cases were used both as tools for formalizing knowledge and as a source for writing the history of medicine. As a major form of medical writing over the long term, case narratives show a great diversity of dealing with singularity and storytelling. They play a key role in the argumentative structure of spa treatises—a genre that took shape at the end of the Middle Ages and within which Meighan’s text is situated. His use of case studies is both promotional—likely more for Barèges itself than for his own practice—and heuristic. It opens a reflection on how medical argumentation moves from the particular to the general. The emphasis on extraordinary cures appears as a double-edged rhetorical strategy, as they border on the miraculous—which was a difficult category in the Enlightenment era, particularly within the British religious context. Combining historical and literary approaches allows for a better understanding of the multiple issues at stake.

When humoral medicine gave way to more scientific approaches in the nineteenth century, the physician's gaze changed. Amongst the epistemological transformations were representations and perceptions of the poor patient: the pauvre malade-a pauper who happened to be sick and was to be taken care of by traditional medical charities-became a malade pauvre, a sick person who happened to be poor and was to be treated in new institutions. This article explores these changes but in settings beyond the clinic. In three case studies, we explore the practice of the Genevan physician Louis Odier, the management of the poor in the French spa of Saint-Amand and, finally, treatises about British spas. The agency of physicians, administrators and the poor themselves are analysed. Physicians played an ambiguous role. Some resisted innovation and refused to consider the poor as suffering from the same diseases as the affluent; others made opportunistic use of case histories, including those of the poor, to convince richer patients of the benefits of specific treatments, thereby reinforcing 'class-blind' ontological conceptions of disease. Administrators, for their part, tended to see the poor foremost as patients and put pressure on physicians to arrive at precise diagnoses.

Whether in the academic or the medical world, electricity and animal magnetism shared a similar and interdependent history, a history that showed the limits of absolute categorizations and demonstrated the necessity of redefining borders in light of controversies and events. These borders were, by definition, points of tension and opposition, as well as places requiring negotiation and exchange. Considering only those personalities mentioned in the article by Sutton devoted to medical electricity and animal magnetism, the strict opposition between inclusion and exclusion is inadequate. Indeed, the process of the classification of knowledge is not linear, nor is it an appanage of official Parisian institutions. The medical field, itself, was not restricted to scholarly disputes; it had to take into account commercial and professional dynamics as well. Depending on the different points of view and the issues, the demarcation of knowledge, of personalities, and of legitimate practices are not identical. Such a fluid border characterized the margins of medicine in which Mesmer and the Mesmerists evolved.

Although electricity had been used for healing purposes in the late 1740s, it was not until 1770 that it was truly medicalized. The article analyzes how physicians incorporated the fashionable "fluid" and the machines that produced it into their practices and identities. Doctors fashioned electricity as a medical remedy, asserting their authority upon its therapeutic uses. Nonetheless other users were involved such as patients, handlers, and audiences. However, due to the black-boxing process orchestrated by physicians their roles have been neglected. As the domestication of medical electricity and selfmedication challenged medicalization, hospital based treatments were developed, which reinforced medical expertise. Even so, the process remained incomplete and natural philosophers as well as surgeons maintained alternative practices.

Evoquer la pharmacopee ancienne suscite le plus souvent, chez l’historien comme chez son lecteur, une empathie affligee qui peut etre accompagnee d’un vague degout pour les substances employees. Ingurgiter des melanges improbables comprenant des ingredients aussi disparates que du mercure, des mineraux, des tissus animaux, de la chair de vipere, de la chair humaine et une grande variete de plantes ne peut, semble-t-il, qu’etre desagreable et inutile. Recourir a la pharmacopee d’Ancien Regime ...

Durant les dernières décennies du XVIII e siècle, l’électricité a pu apparaître comme le principe moteur de la nature. Les mémoires pour les concours organisés par l’Académie de Lyon soulignent l’omniprésence du fluide électrique et son rôle dans les phénomènes atmosphériques ou astronomiques. Ils exposent également son importance dans les aspects physiologiques, moraux et sociaux des activités humaines. L’électricité permet ainsi d’établir une vision unifiée du monde.