Les Mis 365 3.4.1- Combeferre & Joly, Science and Medicine Post #2: Ecole de Medecine and le Musée D'Histoire de la Médecine.
So I’m feeling a little bit guilty for jumping in with these sections before looking carefully at the language of the sections that precede them, but...I can always go back, right?
So, checking back into various discussion archives, apparently there is some uncertainty about whether Combeferre was studying medicine? But if we assume he was, I’m thinking that he & Joly would have attended school here:
The Ecole de Medecine (or Faculte de Medecine) had been recently reopened in the early 1800s under Napoleon’s new plan for Parisian universities, so I guess that fits.
Historians of science/medicine, please feel free to correct me if this is all a bunch of bunk.
Here’s the Ecole de Chirugie, designed at the end of the 18th century:
I can just picture them coming down the narrow Rue de l’Ecole de Medecine, hurrying to classes:
While I was hanging around taking these photos, I also discovered that there is a museum devoted to the history of medicine housed in the medical school as well.
Apparently, you have to be really motivated in order to go to it, though, because 1. It’s only open for 3 hours a day, on certain days of the week, and 2. it’s pretty trickily located on the top floor of one of the medical school buildings, around a series of corridors, and behind an unmarked door that looks like it’s locked. When i finally reached it, I made some comment to the woman working at the desk about how it had been a bit “complique” to find. In return, I just got a raised eyebrow and the “Ah, bon?” that is essentially Parisian for “O Rly.”
It is pretty cool inside, though:
Real nineteenth-century gallery aesthetic, which I find very appealing.
Mid-nineteenth century, I think?
The combination of seeing this as well as spending all this time with Hugo put me in mind of this Emily Dickinson poem for some reason:
“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!
There was a lot of cool equipment in there, including a medical kit from the Napoleonic Wars, but I have to admit that I didn’t take a lot of pictures because a. my battery died and b. I’m a bit squeamish, and there was a little more, um, “women’s health” related stuff than I’m really comfortable seeing from this period.
But there were also these:
Two devices for the delivery of anesthesia, mid- and late-nineteenth respectively.
He (Combeferre) believed in all dreams, railroads, the suppression of suffering in chirurgical operations, the fixing of images in the dark chamber, the electric telegraph, the steering of balloons.
I...have a lot of feelings about this passage, with Hugo narrating about Combeferre’s dreams from the future where, presumably, these things had already come to pass. (I haven’t checked about the telegraph, but the first successful experiments with anesthesia in surgery occurred in the 1840s, I believe?) I just wish Combeferre had gotten to see these dreams become reality, which would have happened in a comparatively short time.
