Some scholars' financial destitution is further illustrated when, in 1789, Henry Essex Edgeworth wrote to his friend bishop Francis Moylan of Cork on behalf of one Fitzgerald, a medical student who was obliged to borrow five guineas, to persuade his father to send him money to pay his debts and return fare home. Thus it was in a sense liberating for James Blackwell to be a recipient of a burse, and evidence exists supporting the claim that he was in fact a privileged bursary-holder. At 8 am on 29 October 1792 the two deputies who had been authorised to supervise the election of a new administrator by the students arrived at Collège des Irlandais and called upon Truchon, substitute procurator of the Commune, to join them.We assembled all the young Irish bursary-holders of the said establishment in the chapel, we read to them there out loud article 8 of the rules of the establishment and in pursuance of the said article obtained from them the prescribed oath, by which they swore to elect, according to their conscience, the most suitable persons, swayed neither by personal interest nor solicitation and we then proceeded to the nomination of a Provisor-Superior, by means of a ballot. There were nine voters present: Murray, Duckett, Mac Sheehi senior, Mac Sheehi junior, Curtayne, "B. Blackwell," J Oneill, Ferris, MacMahon… Also, an undated document lists Major Blackwell as an individual in receipt of monies from college revenues. The Revolution and subsequent wars caused the closing of the College and the sequestration of the burses. When John Baptist Walsh reopened the College after the Treaty of Amiens (1802), instead of founding bursaries 'which experience had taught him, proved of little value to the Irish mission', he devised what he called 'annual pensions of encouragement.' Shortly after entering Collège des Lombards however, Blackwell discovered that he had no vocation to the priesthood, and we find him studying medicine at the Bicêtre Hospital. "Irishmen were particularly strong in the medical faculty," Swords informs us. "[They] also achieved prominence in court circles: John MacSheehy and John O'Reilly were both physicians to Louis XVI. As well as theology and law, medicine and surgery could be studied by burse-holders in the Irish college and Irish doctors had established a number of substantial foundations there expressly for these disciplines." The officers serving in the Irish regiments in the French army were the other Irish community of significance that sought the services of the Irish colleges.