| Summary: | Medical education directly delivered at the bedside, i.e. clinical lessons, was one of the great eighteenth-century educational innovations affecting medical learning. The initiative to establish such training is generally attributed to the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave, who conceived the institution upon his appointment as professor at the University of Leiden, in 1714. In Paris it was only from 1780 that the physician Louis Desbois de Rochefort started clinical lecturing at the Hôpital de la Charité. The superiority gained by that hospital due to the novelty of the teaching that was provided in it explained why, when health schools were created by the National Convention on 14 Frimaire An III (December 4, 1794), it was the place that was chosen to establish the first school of clinical medicine that would be provided with premises most specially adapted to its function. Because of the budgetary contingencies associated with the political situation, the yard happened to be interrupted several times, but was eventually carried through. Major adjustments made in connection with those works, by the architect Nicolas-Marie Clavareau, in what was the chapel of the Hôpital de la Charité, resulted in an architectural work of its own. By an irony of history, the main part of the chapel has recently met again with a worshipping vocation, becoming in 1943 the Parisian church for the Ukrainian Catholic community, without this leading to the disappearance of the amenities designed for the installation of the school of clinical medicine. They thus constitute an exceptional testimony of the architecture of the Revolutionary era that shone far more with its projects than with its achievements.
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