Tag: French Revolution
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A tale of three doctors
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “How true it is that it is difficult to benefit mankind without some unpleasantness resulting for oneself.”– Dr. Edme-Claude Bourru, giving Dr. Guillotin’s eulogy Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, M.D. (1738–1814) was an ex-Jesuit priest, a practicing physician, and a politician just before and during the French Revolution.1,2 He was an opponent of capital punishment…
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Dr. Dominique Larrey
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Dominique Jean Larrey (1766-1842), the orphaned son of a shoemaker, was raised by an uncle who was a surgeon and became a physician himself by the age of twenty-one. He gave medical assistance to those who stormed the Bastille and supported the French Revolution. In the first war waged against republican France,…
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Jean-Paul Marat, physician and revolutionary
JMS PearceHull, England The murder of the notorious Jean-Paul Marat in his bath in July 1793 by Charlotte Corday is a tale where revolution, art, and medicine each played a part. When the commoners stormed the Bastille royal prison in Paris on July 14, 1789, to defy the Ancien Régime, they struck a blow for…
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Another look at the medical problems of Jean-Paul Marat: Searching for a unitary diagnosis
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) was a practicing physician, scientist, and a leader of the French Revolution. He also suffered from a chronic, intractable skin condition, which troubled the last five years of his life. A tormenting itch caused him to spend whole days1 in his custom-made bathtub, from which he wrote revolutionary articles…
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Madame Defarge: The psychology of vengeance
Sarah Jane I. IrawaParañaque City, Philippines “And with these hands I keep a memoryOf the ones who’ve done such wrongUntil the judgment comes and all of us are freeI knit a picture of the way it ought to be.”1 In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sketches a portrait of Madame Defarge, “a woman of…
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Jean Corvisart: Napoleon’s physician
An outstanding diagnostician and pioneer in cardiology, Jean Nicolas Corvisart de Marets has been called the founder of French clinical medicine. He advocated the careful clinical examination of the heart, described syndromes and signs of heart disease that to this day still bear his name, and popularized percussion of the chest as a diagnostic tool,…