This article discusses the foundation of urban medical societies in early nineteenth-centuryBelgium. The scientific ambitions of these societies, so this article argues, providenew insights into the nineteenth-century period of “medical reform”. Their activitiesshow, first of all, how the traditional model of the general learned society was graduallytransformed into a new urban society model, in which the practice of science was placedcenter stage. Secondly, the tensions between this urban scientific model, which developedmost strongly in the provincial cities, and the advisory institutions on the national level,such as the Belgian Académie de médecine, hint at a little studied movement within Belgianmedicine that was critical of government interference in the medical sciences.
