Doctors and surgeons, primarily military-based physicians, were killed in large numbers during the wars and were in short supply to staff medical facilities after the fighting ended.
[1] Antoine Francois comte De Fourcroy, a French Chemist who was a former member of the Ancien Régime Academy of Sciences, was called upon by the National Convention.
[1] After the revolution, doctors and surgeons in hospitals around France had an unprecedented number of corpses at their disposal and relatively lax oversight in terms of their dissection.
This provided them with a strong opportunity to pathologize and classify new diseases and abnormalities from the plethora of dead bodies that occupied the hospitals.
[1] Fourcroy sought to take advantage of these newly accessible corpses for the purpose of educating new medical students with a more hands-on experience.