Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss some features of the physician’s figure in the European context in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Thus, two documents have been chosen to be analyzed. They are dissertations dealing on the influence and treatment of passions as phenomena related to illness. Besides, their authors (Clément-Joseph Tissot and William Falconer) use their discourses to present themselves as bearers of a key ethical function, the emotional regulation of (sick) people. The hypothesis sustained in this article claims that these therapeutic practices that unfold the power of the physician beyond the domain of the body reaching moral life have been a crucial element for the understanding of the physician’s scientific persona as outcome of a genealogical process. This process implies a set of medical theories about the functioning of the body and the techniques of a scientific beholder, on one side, and, on the other, the constitution of a certain kind of authority grounded on this knowledge and on the growing of a certain kind of intimacy between physician and patient.