I'm specifically interested in France and medicine, but really curious in general if the concept of "studying abroad" was taken the same way that it is today.
Was it common or expected for certain fields? How did universities and education at that level compare to that of America?
The first study abroad program in the United States was created in 1923 by the University of Delaware and sent students to France. Before that Americans did not typically receive academic credit for being abroad while they were enrolled at a university in the United States. Nevertheless, many college age Americans attended European universities or simply traveled in Europe prior to the creation of study abroad programs.
Attending a German university was seen as particularly prestigious in nineteenth century America. English universities were seen as producing aristocrats rather than scholars, and Oxford and Cambridge required students to be associated with the Anglican church. France and the Sorbonne were suspect because of their Catholicism. German education was considerably better than that of the United States, and universities like Harvard sometimes created scholarships to send their distinguished graduates to study in Germany.
The German manner of higher education- particularly in graduate education- would later become the model for the American university system. The PhD as a degree first appeared in Germany and only started to be offered by some American universities in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Any American hoping to reach the top levels of academia would probably be expected to hold a German PhD.
German scholarship utterly shaped certain fields. The modern academic study of history, for example, often is associated with Leopold Von Ranke, a professor at the University of Berlin. The two Americans who founded history departments at Harvard and Columbia had been students of professor Hermann Eduard Holst at the University of Freibourg. German was a required language for most serious American scholars.
Alternatively, if an American wanted to study in Europe they might not attend a university at all. Wealthy Americans often saw going on a “grand tour” of Europe as a part of young adulthood. The work of Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole, for instance, was heavily inspired by the landscapes he saw when visiting Italy.
Reference:
Peter Novick. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).