Histoire des sciences medicales最新文献

The invalid soldiers and officers during French Consulate and 1st Empire were taken care of in the National Residence of the Invalids, if they were badly wounded and had remained cripple. The conditions to enter the Residence and the way of life they lived there are scrutinized.

Born in Reims, Dr H. M. Husson was appointed as the secretary for the Parisian Medical Committee for the Inoculation of the Vaccinia in March 1800. In September of the same year, he founded the first provincial Committee for Vaccination in Reims. At this occasion, he showed his colleagues the doctors Caque (Hôtel-Dieu hospital), Navier (General Hospital), Demanche, his father Jean Husson and Dr Duquénelle (surgeons at the hôtel-Dieu hospital), the techniques to vaccinate, to take off the "vaccination fluid", to preserve it and to inject it. He also tought them the various methods elaborated by the Committee to differentiate the real from the fake vaccinia, based on the looks and evolution of the lesions. As a tribute to his colleagues from Reims, to their original works and their efforts to spread the use of the vaccination, Husson dedicated to them his Historical and Medical Research on Vaccination, "as a display of his unalterable attachment and of his most distinguished consideration". Eleven years later, Husson vaccinated the King of Rome and, in 1839, he became the president of the French Medical Academy.

During the French Revolution and Napoleon's campaigns, above-knee or below-knee amputations were performed either immediately or with a delay, which favoured septic problems. A rapidly operated amputation by a well-trained surgeon was the best way to save the life of a soldier who suffered from an open comminuted fracture of a limb. The conditions on military campaigns were indeed hard ones: doctors and surgeons had practically no resources and the transportation of severely injured persons was difficult. Such conditions favoured the pain and the danger caused by an injury, and it was rather impossible for the medical corps to lavish repeated treatments on the wounds. The amputated soldiers were then given prostheses: either a traditional peg-leg, with a flexed knee joint for trans-tibial amputations, or an "imitative" prosthesis, which tended to look like a real leg with eventually an articulated knee or foot. The author mentions famous or unrecognized amputated men, describing significant events.

François Ribes was a surgeon at Emperor Napoleon's so called ambulance of the battle field but he is not well known despite his high offices. On his record of service there are 20 battles, 17 fights and 3 sieges during the Revolution and Empire. Beside his numerous campaigns he was a surgeon at the parisian Invalides Hospital and was highly thought of as a good anatomist. He wrote 84 articles and 47 memoirs of which the best known is entitled History of the autopsy and embalming of Louis XVIII's corpse. However, as a health officer, he only wrote 40 pages about his military campaigns, published in 1845.

After the suppression of medical education during the French revolution in 1793, the lack of caregivers is dramatic, especially in the army. The medical education is therefore rehabilitated in 1794 in 3 (then 6) Health Schools, which will become Schools of Medicine and Faculties of Medicine, incorporated in 1808 into then Imperial University. During 3 years, the courses are theoretical and also based on a practical teaching on the patient. The defense of a thesis provides access to the title of doctor in medicine or surgery and allows practicing for all the pathologies on the entire territory of the Empire. Meanwhile, medical courses are given in military hospitals to train officers of health. They are dedicated for the service of the army and for minor diseases in rural areas. They are authorized to practice only in the department in which they were received. The inspectors general provide medical education directly in the military medical structures and conduct examinations about medical care. This type of career is illustrated by the biography of Surgeon Major François Augustin Legaÿ.

The correspondence of Montesquieu published by the Oxford Foundation informs about visual disorders of the founder of the socio-political science. The examination of his bust's face done by J.B. Lemoyne reveals a divergent squint of the left eye; the one with which he fold that he only could see big objects. This amblyopia was a premature and prolonged embarrassment. During the last ten years of his life, from 1748, date of publication of the Esprit des lois up to his death in 1755 he was blind because of the cataract of the other eye. He has not able to bust in surgery, while the French surgeon Jacques Daviel already proceeded to the extraction of the lens as we do it nowadays.

Lead is a major public health issue. Its use has been increasing since Neolithic times, climaxing in the Ancient Rome and the nineteenth century. Defining the frequency of plumbism before modern times proves to be a difficult matter because of its various and delayed symptoms, and of diagenetic processes affecting bones. After reviewing various methods of lead measurement in bone and tooth, we will expose ways to ascertain lead measurement interpretation in order to estimate the epidemiology of plumbism in ancient times.

Massage and medical gymnastics are very ancient form of medical practices and knowledge, nevertheless they seem to focus a growing attention between 1860 and World War I in Europe. These practices know a quick institutionalization, and the physiotherapy or "kinesitherapy" emerge as a discipline with some more structured training course for students and future practitioners. In fact, the determinants of this development are numerous, specialization, professionalization, cultural transfer, and more broadly with geopolitical influences and nationalist feelings, influence of the Swedish gymnastics.

Franz Liszt's eldest daughter, Blandine Ollivier, died at the age of 26, two months after the birth of her son Daniel. The reasons of that death remain obscure. There are contradictions between the asserted good health of Blandine during her pregnancy and what was learnt later on through the publication in French of Richard Wagner's autobiography. He was the husband of Cosima who was herself Blandine's sister. We put forward some hypotheses that can be discussed; Blandine would have contracted a serious anemia of pregnancy, unknown, with a streptococcus septicemia in post partum; no sign or symptom in consideration of mastitis carcinosis.

After a first lecture, in April 2013, about the presence of mammals in medical language, the author gives another part of his panorama of animal metaphors used in medicine, focusing this time on the birds, aquatic animals and insects. The second part of this study confirms that animals, or at least the image of them in the past, were regularly present in medical nosology.