What was to be the catalyst for this new vision of medical science? Utter chaos in the field, strangely enough:

"With the reaction that set in after 9 Thermidor...the 'brigandage' became widespread. From the beginning of the war, but especially after the mass rising of autumn 1793, many doctors joined the army, either as volunteers or conscripts; the quacks had a free field." (p. 65)

Hospitals were emptied to make room for wounded soldiers, poorly trained doctors were doing more harm than good: "there was a case of an officer of health in the Creuse who killed his patients by administering purges of arsenic" (p. 66), and teaching structures completely disintegrated.

In the wake of this medical cataclysm:

"The enlightened classes, the intellectual circles, who had returned to power or obtained it as last, wished to restore to knowledge the privileges that would be able to protect both the social order and individual lives. In several cities, the administrations, 'affrighted by the ills that they had witnessed' and 'afflicted by the silence of the law', did not wait until the legislature had made its decions: they decided to establish their own control over those who claimed to practise medicine; they set up commissions composed of doctors of the Ancien Regime, who would pass judgement on the qualifications, knowledge, and experience of all newcomers." (p. 67)

Yet this resuscitation of the clinic would not be a direct reinstating of its previous principles:

"To all appearances, it was simply reviving, as the only possible way of salvation, the clinical tradition that had been developed in the eighteenth century. In fact, what was involved was something quite different...It is a question, in the absence of any previous structure, of a domain in which truth teaches itself, and, in exactly the same way, offers itself to the gaze of both the experienced observer and the naive apprentice; for both their is only one language: the hospital, in which the series of patients examined is itself a school. The abolition of both the old hospital structures and the university made possible, then, the immediate communication of teaching within the concrete field of experience; furthermore, it effaced dogmatic language as an essential stage in the transmission of truth. The silencing of university speech and the abolition of the professorial chair made it possible, beneath the old language, in the obscurity of a partly blind practice, driven this way and that by circumstances, for a language without words, possessing an entirely new syntax, to be formed: a language that did not owe its truth to speech but to the gaze alone. In this hasty recourse to the clinic, another clinic, with an entirely new configuration, was born... what occurred was the restructuring in a precise historical context, of the theme of 'medicine in liberty': in a liberated domain, the necessity of the truth that communicated itself to the gaze was to define its own institutional and scientific structures." (p. 68-9)

The clinic resurfaces as an institution capable not only of practice but also discovery -- it is transformed into a vehicle of science. Yet there was still a great deal of contention as to how the new system would be formally structured. But to make a long and complex story short, the eventual outcome was that five school of medicine were established, of which "[t]he only real innovation was the requirement of a clinical test" (p. 77). Yet this innovation is a significant one since "for the first time, the criteria of theoretical knowledge and those of a practice that can be linked only to experience and custom were found together in a single instiutional framework" (p. 77). Cabanis's Intervention and the Reorganization of Year XI. Cabinis, one of the leading phsycians and theoreticians of his time, "dealt with two problems: that of the officers of health and that of examination" (p. 78).