May '68, a showcase in science

#8: With the Vietnam War in full swing governments tended to involve scientists in the militarization of society and the May ‘68 movement prompted a whole generation of researchers to challenge this harnessing of science to destroy the world. Like the group "Survivre et vivre” (Surviving and Living), their criticism of nuclear weaponry evolved into protest against civilian nuclear power. By taking up environmental issues, they helped to lay the foundations of modern ecology.

May '68 had turned French society upside down. Yet abortion was still highly illegal. Pierre Jouannet discovered a painless abortion technique in an apartment in 1972, the Karman method. This triggered a new movement. Many medical doctors like Ségolène Aymé and Pierre Jouannet decided there was no time to be lost and that the law had to be challenged by helping women who wanted to terminate their pregnancy. This is how the “Movement for Abortion and Contraception Freedom” (MLAC) came into being…

#6: How can "insanity” and "mental health” be defined? Does the mental asylum have a repressive or medical function? Does psychiatric practice really serve the interests of patients? Intellectual effervescence around the concepts of psychiatry already bloomed before May 68, but psychiatrists Paul Brétecher and Boris Cyrulnik help us to understand how these events provided new impetus. A new generation of practitioners began to emerge, one that was inspired by the criticism of institutions and…

#5: Does science really mean progress? Can it ascertain truths regardless of the society in which it operates? After May 1968, many scientists and researchers questioned the foundations of scientific ideology and its relationship with the authorities. As they began to "become sociologists in some way", man and women of science started to advocate a dismantling of the barriers within scientific knowledge and practice and stand for multidisciplinary and socially related science making.

#4: The wind of freedom of the May '68 movements blew as a formidable means of spreading the ideas of struggle for women's rights and finally attacking the gender hierarchy. This also extended to academia and the research community. We will see how difficult it was to be a woman of science at that time through Ségolène Aymé's story who was then a medical student against the will of her family. This was also when the physicist and sociologist Jacqueline Feldman decided time had come to get…

#3: In the wake of May 1968, young doctors wanted to put health care at the service of the population and joined forces to form the Health Information Group. How can medicine best serve the interests of workers, who were the left-behind in society? How could the field of medicine be freed from its confines and opened up to "users"? Should the vertical doctor-patient relationship be reversed? Those were the questions that these doctors have been facing in their advocacy and praxis ever since.

#2: “Like anywhere, no more big shots in Health Care!” was the slogan which had the day in May '68. The whole paternalistic model of knowledge and social organization fell apart, in laboratories, hospital departments and universities. Everywhere, students and young researchers challenged hierarchical relationships, any authority no longer accepted, and shouted out loud "Damn the mandarins!"

#1: May ‘68 marked the beginning of political life for some students and young researchers. For others who were already politically active, this event came as a tremendous surprise! Figures of the time take us back to that wonderful month of May with the occupation of the Sorbonne, the barricades on Boulevard Saint-Michel and speech breaking free everywhere. The medical school is one of the venues where these happenings took place. In occupied lecture halls, students questioned and challenged…