Introduction
Texte intégral
1Medicine has always been present at the Collège de France. To prepare my introduction to this inaugural lecture, I did some historical research into the long list of our professors, and came across a few surprises. To begin with, I learnt that the first Royal Reader in medicine, in 1542, was the Italian Guido Guidi, physician of François I and then of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Royal Reader’s name shows us that the globalization of science materialized very early at the Collège de France, and that the tradition of appointing foreign professors is longstanding, even if it was eclipsed for several centuries, before being successfully reinstated about twenty years ago.
2My second surprise was to count 68 physicians between 1542 and 2014, in other words 9 % of all professors who have taught at the Collège Royal and then at the Collège de France over the last five centuries. On average, this means that one physician was appointed every seven years. We are nowhere near this rhythm today, even if it is true that the biology Chairs have come to replace some Chairs simply named “Chairs of Medicine” in the past. As a comparison, I counted only 45 Chairs of Mathematics, a discipline that was nevertheless represented alongside medicine from the inception of the Collège Royal, and only 26 Chairs of Physics and 19 Chairs of Chemistry, although admittedly these disciplines were created at the Collège de France in the late eighteenth century only.
3I also learned that there had been dynasties of physician Royal Readers, starting with Martin Akakia II, III and IV who, from father to son and from uncle to nephew, held the Chairs of Medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The strangeness of the name – which means “without malice” in Greek – and the medical filiation irresistibly bring to mind the hilarious Diafoirus father and son of the Imaginary Invalid, and one can only hope for the reputation of our institution that Molière was not inspired by Collège Royal Readers.
4Finally, I found that, in order to be appointed to a Chair of Medicine at the Collège, it didn’t hurt, in ancient times, to be in the service of the sovereign. François I, Charles IX, Henri III, Henri IV and Louis XIII all appointed their physicians as Royal Readers. This tradition even survived the Ancien Régime in the person of Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, whom Napoleon held in high regard. Admittedly, though, in the latter case his appointment at our institution was in no way tainted with favouritism since Corvisart, whose merits were indisputable, entered the Collège in 1797, before becoming the Emperor and Josephine’s personal physician.
5There have nevertheless been many changes since those distant times. Professors are no longer appointed on the basis of personal services rendered to the Head of State; they are chosen by their peers for their qualities as scholars and researchers, and it is of course these criteria that earned Alain Fischer his election to the Chair of Experimental Medicine at the Collège de France as of today. My historical digression should not mislead anyone into thinking that you are succeeding court physicians in this Chair. Medicine became a fully-fledged experimental science in the early nineteenth century and for two hundred years your predecessors have been great pioneers of physiology and medicine. I need only mention the names of Laennec, François Magendie, Claude Bernard or Charles Nicolle and, more recently, Antoine Lacassagne and Jean Dausset, not to forget the latest Chair holder, your direct predecessor, our colleague and honorary Administrator Pierre Corvol.
6I will say only a few words, Alain Fischer, about your parallel journeys in the academic and medical worlds, which put you in the lineage of these prestigious professors. After a paediatrics internship, you entered the immunology and paediatric haematology teams at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital, which you have not left since, and where you served as Department Head from 1996 to 2012. In 1998 you were appointed Professor of Medicine at Paris-Descartes and, from 1991 to 2013, you headed the Inserm mixed research unit “Normal and Pathological Development of the Immune System”. You are a member of the French Academy of Sciences and of the Académie nationale de médecine. You were a member of the National Consultative Ethics Committee from 2003 to 2009 and since then, you have been heading the Imagine Institute of genetic diseases, which brings together researchers from 21 laboratories around translational research to acquire fundamental knowledge in immunology and genetics, and to translate it as fast and as efficiently as possible at the clinical level. You have received many French and international prizes, including the 2008 Inserm Grand Prix and the Louis-Jantet Prize for Medicine in 2001.
Auteurs
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Serge Haroche
Administrator of the Collège de France
- Liz Libbrecht (trad.)
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