[The past, education and science. Félix Vicq d'Azyr and the history of medicine in the18th century].

As a result of a process initiated by the end of the 1 7th century, in the second half of the 18th century the history of medicine became an autonomous branch of the medical knowledge. The uses of the past were no longer those which prevailed in the Renaissance times, and the inherited knowledge played no more a significant role in the production of active medical knowledge. The ideas of the French anatomist and doctor Félix Vicq d'Azyr (1748-1794) on the history of medicine represent an original synthesis of the new frames of historical thought, from a theoretical and methodological point of view as well as in regard with the institutional and pedagogical functions of medical history. Vicq d'Azyr was the first, in fact, to assign to what he viewed as an independent discipline a specific place as a new chair in medical education.