Histoire des sciences medicales最新文献

Two modern novelists of the 20th century native from the Landes, François Mauriac (1885-1970) and Pierre Benoit (1886-1962), were eager to locate a part of their novels in the French South-West. Beyond the silence and the torrid warmth of this "sand desert populated by pine trees", each of them make live, suffer and die their sick heroes from diseases treated with therapies of that time with the risk of voluntary or not drug misuse : tuberculosis, cardiac insufficiency, angina pectoris, puerperal and typhoid fevers and other diseases.

A number of literary books relate the course of a cancer. These are testimonies on a personnal tumour or on the tumour of a proxy. They give a useful view of the disease by lay authors, complementary of the view of the physicians.

A medical doctor graduated in 1901, Henri Vangeon (1875-1944) was early known as a writer with the name of Henri Ghéon. In poetry, he joined the group of the symbolists lead by Mallarmé and Verhaeren. His activity grew with publishing reponsibility for the review 'Ermitage, followed by the NRF founded in 1909 by Gide, Schlumberger and soon after with Gallimard. Mainly devoted to novels and plays, the NRF rapidly succeeded. During the war, Ghéon acted in the health serv- ice. Then; he returned to the christianfaith, and lead his own way for creating numerous religious plays, honorated in Canada in 1938. In june 1944, he died in Paris.

Boris Wan, a mythical figure of the post war years, just missed the succession of therapeutic advances in cardiology in the mid of the XXth century. A acute articular rhumatism occurred in 1932, as penicillin, discovered in 1928, was not yet on the market. Aortic regurgitation followed. On July 20, 1955, a pulmonary edema occurs as the first case of open-heart surgery with extra corporeal circulation is performed by Charles Dubost in 1955. But only the aortic stenosis may benefit from this surgery. Regarding aortic regurgitation, an artificial valve is necessary. The first Starr-Edwards heart valve is implanted on August 25, 1960. June 23 , 1959, Boris Wan made a sudden loss of consciousness probably due to a ventricular fibrillation. It is this same year that the electric shock is used for the first time, but only in hospital. Boris Wan died during transport to the Laennec hospital. Ambulances were not yet equipped with defibrillator.

Antimony was a chemical drug, similar to arsenic and lead, which was used in medicine since the 16th century. It brought intense controversy: for his supporters, it possessed exceptional properties, with three simultaneous effects, summarized by Libavius formula : vomere, cacare, sudare ... appreciable qualities at a time when Humorous theory was anchored in the minds. The detractors of antimony, among whom Guy Patin (1602-1671), pointed out that many patients treated with this remedy died... Patin's reflexions against the use of antimony in medicine are found in his letters, with a cumulative list of accidents that Patin liked to call his "martyrology of antimony", an expression he used, for example, in a letter to Andri Falconet on March 20, 1654. Our aim is to place Guy Patin's writings in the medical and social debate of his time, when several writers such as Benserade, Molire and Boileau also participated.

The survival of French museums of the history of medicine is very much threatened by the lack of interest shown by their supervisory authorities. Their collections are invaluable both from a patrimonial point of view and from their interest in research, teaching future health professionals, raising public awareness of health issues and their memory importance in relation to the suffering of generations of Sick people. As part of the "Ile de la Cite" project, the opening of a large health museum on part of the site of the Hotel-Dieu in Paris would be a strong signal to enhance this extraordinary heritage.

The Dupuytren Museum in Paris has a remarkable anatomic specimen which figures in the surgeon Larrey's works of 1812 and 1829. It consists of a soldier's skull impaled by the ramrod of the musket of one of his co-soldiers. The wounded soldier survived two days with this ramrod through his head. Besides this singular case, Larrey reports several observations of the uses and misuses of trephination with local and general appropriate cares to provide. Indications are also exposed in the Dictionnaire des sciences medicales Panckoucke published in 1821.

Our purpose was to analyse the treatment of one of Galen's major contributions, his systematization of the doctrine of the four temperaments he inherited from his predecessors (Aristotle, Alcmaeon of Crotone, Empedocles, Philolaus), in Lodovico Casanova's Hieroglyphicorum et medicorum emblematum dodekakrounous (Lugduni, Sumptibus Pauli Frellon, 1626). We concentrated on the four temperaments to study how in medical emblems, allegory and symbols are used to represent medical knowledge through the device of visual loci destined to be decoded and memorized.

The writer explains the origin of the scale measuring the external diameter of different types of bougies, catheter or probes. That scale has turned out to be an essential tool for the best of several specialities created in the 19th century, namely urology. An instrument maker close to the surgeons whose ideas he would quickly grasp, Joseph F. B. Charriere, proposed a scale with thirty holes that would make it possible to get external gauge of the third of a millimetre. Several people tried to imitate his device but his scale was eventually recognized as the most efficient one all over Europe, accepted even by the British and then the Americans. Its usefullness goes on to this day as the French scale has become universal together with the unit that it entails, the Charrire unit, which is still the reference to measure all the diameters used by surgeons and doctors.

In 1656, some Selecta medica of Dr Johannes A. Vander Linden (1609-1664) were published in Leiden. Among these miscellaneous, it was quite unexpected to come on a medical commentary on a fictional character from Plautus' theatre : Cappadox hepaticus, or the Bilious. Today unknown, full of erudite quotations, this scholarly doctor's commentary is both philological and medical, on twenty densely printed pages in Latin. Every term used by Plautus is analized, weighed up, and confronted with texts or contemporary situations, thereby drawing knowlegde for his everyday work, how to define a bilious, hydropical affection.