He did not allow his accessory studies, however, to interfere with his application to his professional work. He was one of those rare men who knew how to rest his mind by turning it from one occupation to another. When scarcely more than a year in Paris, Laennec secured the two first prizes for medicine and surgery in the medical department of the University of Paris. In 1804 he wrote two medical theses, one of them in Latin, the other in French. The subject of both was Hippocrates, the great Greek father of medicine, whom Laennec admired very much and whose method of clinical observation was to prove the key-note of the success of Laennec's own medical career. At this time the Paris school of medicine had two great rival teachers. One of them was Corvisart, who endeavored to keep up the traditions of Hippocrates and taught especially the necessity for careful observation of disease. The other was Pinel, famous in our time mainly for having stricken the manacles from the insane in the asylums of Paris, but who was known to his contemporaries as a great exponent of what may be called "Philosophic Medicine." Corvisart taught principally practical medicine at the bedside; Pinel mainly the theory of medicine by the analysis of diseased conditions and their probable origin. Needless to say, Laennec's sympathies were all with Corvisart. He became a favorite pupil of this great master, who did so much for scientific medicine by introducing the method of percussion, invented nearly half a century before by Auenbrugger, but forgotten and neglected, so that it {143} would surely have been lost but for the distinguished Frenchman's rehabilitation of its practice. Corvisart was a man of great influence. He had caught Napoleon's eye. The great Emperor of the French had the knack for choosing men worthy of the confidence he wished to place in them. His unerring judgment in this matter led him to select Corvisart as his personal physician at a moment when his selection was of the greatest service to practical medicine, for no one was doing better scientific work at the time, and this quasi-court position at once gave Corvisart's ideas a vogue they would not otherwise have had.