The "public service" of surgery: administering first aid and professional practice in Paris in the eighteenth century

The article studies the obligation that Paris surgeons had to offer primary healthcare in the eighteenth century. Ordinances and police archives document what is defined as a «public service of surgery», ie a system which organized occupational surgeons, cheap workforce, hospital and police institutions, medical technology and know-how, and payments along the century. This system was rooted in the domestic economy of the wealthy, in charge of healthcare providing for the household. In case of emergency, surgeons' shops or commissaires' offices served as emergency rooms, before the injured were carried to the Hôtel-Dieu, a center of urban geography of medical emergency, or to the home of the injured. The funding of this organization was grounded in use of surgical nearly free workforce - hospital or surgeons' «students» whose number greatly rose iwn the 18c - and in occupational deontology. Free public service was also funded by high remuneration of witness surgeons in case of criminal procedures; in addition, commissaires warranted surgeons' healthcare payment, by litigation or threath thereof. © Belin. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.