In that autonomous movement and the quasi clandestinity that abetted and protected it, this return to the clinic was in fact the first organization of a medical field that was at once composite and fundamental: composite because, in its everyday practice, hospital experience resembles the general form of a pedagogic system; but fundamental, too, because, unlike the eighteenth century clinic, it is not a question of an encounter, after the event, of a previously formed experience and an ignorance to be dissipated.