Histoire des sciences medicales最新文献

The victories near Ulm and Elchingen, where the Napoleonic army took 60000 prisoners between 15th and 20th of October 1805, lead to the arrival at Troyes (county "Aube") of nearly 2000 Austrian soldiers to be held inside former monasteries among whose, mainly the Jacobinians casern where more than half of them stayed. At the beginning of 1806, the government sent the epidemics medical practitioner Dr Desgenettes on an inspection tour to control the state of health of the populations of places where foreign prisoners were held, which lead him through several counties of the North-eastern part of France, where he surveyed several diseases ranging from all kinds offevers up to dysentery, scabies or gangrenes. With the means of acid fumigations invented by the chemist Guyton Morveau from Dijon, the authorities took care of combating and preventing the epidemics in the caserns. As soon as October 1805, the epidemics medical practitioner Dr Pigeotte from Troyes wrote to the county governor his observations recommending a better diet, airing of the rooms and also calls to take some exercise. All these precepts showed an astonishing modernity.

How is it that lice, such a common parasite, have shaken the Napoleonic empire? This paper, based on medical literature and on proven facts, is going to tell the history of such a "war pestilence", a "contagious typhus".

After the revolutionary upheavals (dispersal of the big properties of privileged persons and abolition of many rights) and a fold on the local market, the vine growing in Champagne found a new balance due to good grape harvests between 1804 and 1814 and due to the territorial expansion. Without supplanting the red wines, the sparkling white wines conquered a new foreign clientele. After the fall of the Eagle the traders rushed to the new markets offered by peace.

SUMMARY During this period, the authority was exerted by Parmentier, as the head and chief pharmacist for the French armies. For the military hospitals scattered all over Europe, he organised the pharmacies services rules, with technical and financial concerns. The first aid devices on the battlefield included a special box for pharmacy containing ressucitation and siccative items for the wounds, and immediately available for the surgeon's use. The qualified pharmacy staff exhibited large variations, from 200 to 1.100 people in 1812.

The author explains military surgeon Balme's biograpyhy, especially during Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign (1798-1801). As there is some possible confusion with another Claude Balme, some archives deserve to be closely scrutinized. Through Balme's reports the author insists on his courageous part in several scurvy or plague epidemics. He was himself marked on his face; he ended his life in Lyons as a town-councillor.

Jean-Pierre Boudet (1748-1828) is a too much unknown apothicary from Rheims, what is surprising considering the atypical character and the interest of his long carrier: a pharmacist and teacher in Rheims then in Paris, he became an inspector of powders and salpetre in the east of France. In 1798 he left the civil pharmacy and became a military pharmacist by embarking with Napoleon for the campaign of Egypt, which he led until its term, before pursuing his military carrier in Prussia and Austria. As a member of the Commission of Sciences and Arts and a member of the Institute of Egypt, he widely participated, but with too great a modesty, in the scientific works stemming from the campaign of Egypt which had aimed to be as military as scientific and artistic.

Alexandre-Urbain Yvan was born on April 28th, 1765 in Toulon, where he entered the military hospital as a student at 14. He got acquainted with Napoleon Bonaparte during the campaigns of Italy. On May 6th, 1800 the Secretary of the war appointed him to the care of the First Consul. He became a close friend of the Bonaparte family and obtained the post of ordinary surgeon of the Emperor. He was going to follow his illustrious patient as his shadow until April 1814. Several arguments evoke Napoleon Ist's suicide attempt, during the night from 12 to 13 April, in Fontainebleau, after the abdication. He absorbed a poison with opium but his menservants thwarted his plan, especially Caulaincourt. Baron Yvan was called at the bedside of the dying sovereign and managed to save him by making him vomit. For fear of being accused of murder, or for some other reason, the surgeon ran away without telling the Emperor. This episode ended definitively the relation between Napoleon and Yvan.

It is essential first to disregard all our knowledge and current certainties to plunge two centuries behind. Pain is recognized: physical, moral, chronic, acute. The story of analgesia finds the use of poppy, but with equal components, in variable quantity, the analgesic potion could be transformed into a poison. In the 17th century Sydenham vulgarizes the use of the laudanum known since the 16th, and the first general anesthesia will take place in 1846, we can say that, under the Empire, we are in the prehistory of the anesthesia. The positioning of the doctors and the surgeons in front of the pain is ambiguous. The pain is lived as inevitable, the first quality of the surgeon is its operating speed which allows to limit the duration of the sufferings. The practitioners in the contact of the suffering are going to try hard to develop clevernesses and subtleties to decrease this daily pain. The physical ways as baths or showers, bloodletting in the inflammatory pains, plants with antispasmodic property (valerian, peony, hemlock) and other more or less trivial pharmacological ways. On the battlefield, the ways are even more rationalized and limited, first the pharmacological ways with the laudanum and the liqueur of Hoffmann, surgery which, by a violent but brief pain, solves the problem of the traumatic pains. Dominique Larrey notices the analgesic effects of the cold, but he does not seem to have voluntarily used it. Acute drunkenness is recognized as dangerous. We are struck by the number of description of violent suicides, in particular at the Hôtel National des Invalides. Just like physical pain, moral suffering is recognized as a disease, described as melancholy but without any practical or therapeutic consequence. Under the Empire, pain is taken care of, according to the criteria of the time, an inescapable fate of which it is necessary to adapt. The field doctors try hard to decrease the pain intensity, but the university medical elites exclude the idea to overcome it totally. Nevertheless, thirty years later, general anesthesia will become possible.