Science doesn’t occupy a world apart in Paris but is integral part of some of the city’s most visited sights. So even if math and science were never your strong points Paris is capable of stimulating your inner geek.

From Eiffel’s engineering to Pasteur’s rabies vaccine, from the trace of the Paris meridian to the swing of Foucault’s pendulum, from the Botanical Garden to the Discovery Palace, science holds a place of honor in the French capital.

It’s a place of honor that’s often ignored. Paris, unbeknownst to must travelers, is one of the world’s most inviting cities for science tourism.

As France commemorates the year of the 350th anniversary of the creation of the Academy of Science it’s time to get your nerd on.

Before setting out, consider a little revision of 5th-grade math and science.

When the concierge tells you that the restaurant is 100 meters from your hotel he means that it’s just 109 yards away. When he tells you that it’ll be 24 degrees Celsius tomorrow that’s t-shirt temperature (75 degrees Fahrenheit). When your fellow jogger in the Luxembourg Garden tells you that a run around the inner perimeter covers 1.6 kilometers you can pace yourself for a cool mile. Before buying a kilo of cheese or chocolate you should know at 2.2 pounds that’s a bit much for one sitting. But 25 centiliters (just over 8 ounces) of draft beer is good enough start for an aperitif, a 350 gram (about 12 ounces) entrecote makes for a hearty meal, and 4 centiliters of calvados brandy makes for a fine nightcap.

A run around the Botanical Garden (Jardin des Plantes) is 1-1.5km depending on the paths you take, but better to take it slow in this 400-year-old institution. That way you take the time to discover its gardens, its zoo and its pavilions dedicated to the sciences associated with plants, animals, minerals and evolution.

The nerdy traveler doesn’t merely see the world-famous sights of Paris, he or she tries to understand what makes them worthy of admiration.

Just as the Mona Lisa, for all her iconic and celebrity status, is first and foremost a major work of art, the Eiffel Tower, before being one of the world’s most recognizable monuments, represents a feat of engineering. Its builder, Gustave Eiffel, wasn’t only interested in understanding structural stability but in all of the scientific advances of his day, especially aerodynamics.

No need to be a math genius to appreciate a few facts and figures about the tower’s construction. If you’d like a little homework before visiting the Iron Lady—or a post-visit cheat sheet—have a look at “All you need to know about the Eiffel Tower” in pdf on the bottom of this page from the official Eiffel Tower website.

Got a taste for astronomical matters? At the center of the magnificent structure that is the Pantheon, you’ll find an example of Foucault’s pendulum demonstrating the rotation of the earth. Not just any example, but an example at the actual location where, in 1851, the general public first saw how the pendulum provided visual evidence of Earth’s rotation.

Foucault first presented his demonstration to men of science at the Paris Observatory. That’s the white dome that one sees when looking south from the center of the Luxembourg Garden. The observatory was founded in 1667, as astronomers were working on defining the Paris Meridian, the line that held sway as zero degrees of longitude. We don’t often see stars in the Paris night sky, but during the daytime the astronomical hunter can look to the ground for markers known as Arago medallions that trace the north-south line of the Paris Meridian. In 1911 Greenwich, England took over the international honor of being on the zero line, pushing Paris east.

Still, Earth’s rotation continued as before. If in Paris on March 20, date of the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, you can watch a spot of sunlight hit a marker by the altar of Saint Sulpice Church, as described here.

Those are just a few examples of opportunities for a scientific approach to visiting the sights of Paris.

Meanwhile, there are a number of fascinating, even unique museums dedicated to scientific study and experimentation.

Those with a penchant for medical developments through the centuries should read this article about Paris’s medical heritage sites and museums.

Universience

Head to the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie at the northeast edge of the city if in the mood for a modern science museum.

I’m a bigger fan, though, of the old-fashion science museum called the Palais de la Découverte, the Discovery Palace, founded in 1937.

I like it for both its presentation—it still has something of a 1930s Frankenstein movie about it, both in the exhibitions and in the grandiose setting of the “palace”—and for its location—right off the Champs-Elysées, adjacent to the Grand Palais (the Great Palace). Consider it a must-see for nerdy children, ages 9 to 99, who wonder about the makings and workings of the physical world.

Together the City of the Sciences and the Discovery Palace form Universcience, a public structure “promoting the culture of science.”

You’d have to be altogether anti-science to not find something to spark your interest and imagination among the exhibits and demonstrations at the Discovery Palace. Permanent exhibitions examine animal communications (rat or octopus demonstrations), optics, the human lottery, hair-raising experiments in electrostatics, sounds and vibrations, aromas and fragrances, mechanics, chemistry, mathematics, pi, the solar system and more. There’s a snack bar/café inside as well. Scientific conferences are given according to a schedule of which can be found here. The Discovery Palace is closed on Monday, as is the museum below.

The National Museum of Technical Innovation

Another outstanding and central museum is the Musée des Arts et Métiers, the National Museum of Technical Innovation, by the metro station Arts et Métiers on the edge of the Marais.

If you aren’t immediately attracted to the theme of technical innovation, you should at least be aware that this brainy museum is among the best of its kind. That’s why it’s been called the Louvre of Technology or the Pantheon of Technical Innovation. I’m no industrial tech-head either, but the objects themselves are as beautiful now as they were innovative when designed.

In 1794, the revolutionary priest Abbé Grégoire presented to the Convention (the body ruling revolutionary France) the idea of creating “a conservatory for arts and trades [arts et métiers] where all of the tools and machines that are newly invented and perfected shall be brought together.” The former Abbey of St-Martin-des-Champs was consecrated to that plan in 1798.

The visitor is greeted outside by a bronze copy of the Statue of Liberty. The circuit inside then begins with a presentation of scientific instruments. From there, the museum is organized in seven sections: materials, construction, communication, energy, mechanics (including choice figures of the museum’s automaton collection) and transportation. There are enough descriptive notices in English to keep you informed without going over the head of the layman. Touch screens provide visuals of the inner workings of the certain machines and technologies.

The circuit ends with the holy of holies, the former abbey church, presented as a veritable church of scientific progress. Another example of Foucault’s pendulum hangs from the ceiling in the 12th-century chapel. In the nave, an early flying machine hangs overhead like an angel, while at the far end the original plaster model of the Statue of Liberty stands like Mary herself, bearing not Child but Flame.

Sacrilege? No, science.

© Gary Lee Kraut

Travel in the spirit of France Revisited with nerd tours and more. See here for more.

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Hospital visits are worrisome enough back home, so it’s understandable that you’d be wary of visiting a medical facility when abroad. But just as you needn’t be an artist or model to visit the Louvre, you needn’t be a doctor or ill to visit one of the city’s historic hospitals and medical museums.

Paris has a rich if sometimes horrific hospital and medical heritage. While exploring that heritage will be especially noteworthy for travelers in the medical field, it offers any off-beat traveler the opportunity to learn much about the history of health care and medical progress in France, of Paris’s treatment of the poor and destitute, and a good deal about rabies, tumors, anatomical pathologies, mental illness, military medicine, radiation therapy and much more.

Furthermore, several of the hospital courtyards described here are so peaceful that visiting them is in itself a form of therapy to the urban pathologies caused by car fumes, noise and crowds of fellow tourists, beginning with an oasis of calm right next to Notre-Dame Cathedral.

The Hôtel Dieu

Notre-Dame Cathedral receives over 14 million visitors per year but only the rare visitor will venture into the Hôtel Dieu, the hospital right beside it, even though their histories are intimately entwined.

Hôtel Dieu, meaning the house where one is welcomed in the name of God, was founded under the auspices of the Church in the 651 and developed as a place where the Church would receive the ill, the poor and pilgrims. Piety, prayer and medical care, as it were, were united. It was more hospice than hospital, nevertheless in Paris as elsewhere in France, the Hôtel Dieu was (in some cities still is) the heart of the hospital system in the growing city. Expanded and rebuilt over the centuries on the southern (Seine) side of Notre-Dame, Paris’s Hôtel Dieu was eventually moved to the northern side then rebuilt as it’s seen today from 1866 to 1876.

The current hospital complex appears from the outside to be an uninviting block. But enter the sliding doors, turn left with no need to ask permission at the front desk, and you will find yourself in a peaceful, flower-filled courtyard. As a sign that the courtyard may actually be too quiet, too ignored, a piano beneath the gallery at between the courtyard’s two levels begs, in English no less, “Play me I’m yours.”

This vast hospital complex is currently underused, and the AP-HP, the organization that operates the city’s public hospital system, is in a quandary as to how to reallocate the space. One day there may be busy shops, a crowded café, lodgings or some other financially attractive tourist-pleasing enterprises. Better to come then before the crowds.

The Hôtel Dieu is alongside the square in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral at 1 Parvis Notre-Dame / Place Jean-Paul II, 4^th arrondissement. Open daily.

As a public hospital there is no longer an affiliation between the Hôtel Dieu and the Catholic Church, yet the name remains as a reminder of its origin. Similarly, other Paris hospitals have their history written into their names. Les Quinze-Vingts (meaning the fifteen twenties), for example, was founded by (Saint) Louis IX in 1260 to house the poor blind, 300 of them (15×20 according to the base 20 counting system). From its original location on what is now rue Saint Honoré, Les Quinze-Vingts was moved at the end of the 18th century to its current site on rue de Charonne in the 12^th arrondissement, where it remains one of France’s foremost ophthalmological institutes.

Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and the treatment of mental illness

La Salpêtrière has also kept its historic name even though gunpowder (using saltpeter) was only briefly produced on the site centuries ago.

La Salpêtrière was a “general hospital,” which, in the ancien regime, did not mean that it provided medical care but that it housed, often by force, the poor and the indigent. In the name of law and order, Louis XIV’s royal edict of 1656 established institutions “for shutting up poor beggars of the city and suburbs of Paris” who “live almost all in ignorance of Religion, contempt for the Sacraments & in the continual habit of all sorts of vices.”

La Salpêtrière’s most prominent feature is Saint Louis Church (1678), which can be freely visited along with the surrounding courtyard. In 1684 the complex expanded with the addition of a maison de force where, among others, prostitutes and women and girls who couldn’t be controlled by their husband or family were forcibly interned.

La Salpêtrière may have helped clean up the streets of the capital but it became a sick city unto itself where a mix of beggars, vagabonds, indigents, criminals, the deranged, the “incurably” insane (in many cases chained up for life), the socially disobedient, orphans, the destitute and the aged lived in close proximity, often in ghastly conditions.

In the history of the hospitals and asylums of Paris, La Salpêtrière is above all associated with the incarceration of women and particularly of madwomen (les aliénés). Through them, it is also associated with the evolution of the treatment of mental and neurological disorders (or those diagnosed as such), along with those who sought to improve their living conditions or treat them. A statue by the entrance shows Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), bienfaiteur des aliénés, unchaining a ward of the asylum. Jean-Martin Charcot (1815-1893), a neurologist who used hypnosis among other techniques to attempt understand and to cure “hysteria,” also worked here.

In the early 19th century the notorious “general hospital” was transformed into a civil hospital. La Pitié-Salpêtrière then merged with the adjacent hospital La Pitié in the 1960s, creating the sprawling complex of La Pitié-Salpêtrière, near Gare d’Austerlitz in the 13th arrondissement.

Temporary exhibitions are occasionally presented here, but even without them one can enter within the once-daunting walls of La Salpêtrière is to visit Saint Louis Church and the peaceable courtyard. Fear not, there has been no mental asylum here since 1921.

Hôpital de La Pitié-Salpêtrière. The main entrance to this vast hospital complex is at 83 boulevard de l’Hôpital, 75013, beside the Saint Marcel metro station. However, the historic Salpêtrière portion, including Saint Louis Church, can be entered directly 200 yards downhill at 47 rue de l’Hôpital.

The Museum of the History of Medicine

Even in hospitals more welcoming than the old Salpêtrière it’s difficult to imagine living in a time and place when might have been subjected to the variety of medical tools at the Museum of the History of Medicine, located in the old Faculty of Medicine, now Université Paris Descartes in the 6^th arrondissement.

This old-fashion museum, which appears little changed since the room was built in 1905, presents a sweeping view of medical, mostly surgical, progress over the centuries.

Here we can examine medical techniques and technology as practiced through the ages in Paris: scythes for removing gangrened limbs (ponce patients had been knocked out with sponges imbibed with opium or henbane), prosthetics that may have replaced those limbs in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, 17^th– and 18^th-century amputation kits, 18^th-century surgical kits, 19^th-century bladder stone retrieval instruments, the evolution of obstetrical forceps and much more. We learn about the origins of cataract removal in the 1700s.

The museum displays an original wood-and-brass stethoscope that René Laennec invented in Paris in 1816. Previously a doctor would place his ear directly on a patient’s chest to listen to the heart. Laennec worked at Necker Hospital, which was founded in 1778. The hospital’s originality in Paris at the time was that each patient had his or her own bed. In 1802 it was designated as a children’s hospital, the world’s first. Located in the 15^th arrondissement, it is still a world-renowned pediatric hospital.

Musée d’Histoire de la Médecine, 12 rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, 6^th arrondissement. Metro Odéon. Open 2-5:30pm except Thurs., Sun. and holidays. Entrance: 3€50.

Dupuytren Museum

From the Museum of the History of Medicine, you can cross the street to the Dupuytren Museum, which has existed since 1835 to present examples of anatomical pathologies.

The museum’s display of skeletons, skulls, bones, wax molds, organs in jars, paintings, drawings and photographs is not a pretty sight, but it’s a sight nonetheless, the kind that can either ruin your day or put into perspective the fashion boutiques of the nearby Saint-Germain Quarter. A plaque outside the Cordeliers complex where the museum is located honors the 1800 doctors who “died for France” during the First World War.

Musée Dupuytren, Centre des Cordeliers, 15 rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, 6^th arrondisssement. Metro Odéon. Open Mon.-Fri. 2-5pm. Closed late July to early September. Entrance: 5€, 3€ for students and teachers.

Saint Louis Hospital: The Courtyard and the Museum of Molds

Saint Louis Hospital, near Canal Saint Martin in the 10^th arrondissement, reveals Paris’s medical and hospital heritage at its most architecturally sublime and at its most infectiously and tumorously horrific.

During the Middle Ages and beyond, periods of plague could be devastating in the dense capital. In 1607 Henri IV fulfilled a desire of the Catholic Order of Augustinians, which administered the Hôtel Dieu, by ordering the construction of a hospital that could be activated during periods of plague. Sainted Louis IX, the hospital’s namesake, had himself died of the plague by the gates of Tunis 1270. The selected site was well beyond the city walls of the time. Contagious patients were further quarantined by being placed within a double walled complex, a feature that makes the central courtyard an exceptional oasis in contemporary Paris.

Two years before launching construction of the hospital, Henri IV had ordered the creation of a royal square in the Marais, later called the Place des Vosges. Two of the architects involved in that project, Claude Chastillon and Claude Vellefaux, were also involved in creating the hospital courtyard. Saint Louis therefore echoes the Place des Vosges in its use of brick and stone, but in a sparer, more modest way. Here, patients with contagious disease resided on the second floor.

Created to deal with epidemics, Saint Louis Hospital was used only periodically for its first 165 years of existence. Then a fire that destroyed the Hotel Dieu in 1772 made permanent use of Saint Louis indispensable while the central hospital was being rebuilt. Before long it too was indispensable in the expanding city.

The original buildings of the early 1600s now house administrative offices while patients come to an adjacent complex of buildings as the hospital has been modernized over the past 30 years. Historically specialized in skin diseases, the hospital now also focuses on other specialties as well, including hematology, oncology and organ transplants.

The old buildings meanwhile appear unchanged, except that now there is no sense of imprisonment in the courtyard but rather of security in a secret garden. Such security, in fact, that on weekday afternoon, in the sun or in the shade of the surprising variety of tree species here, this is the preferred playground for neighborhood preschool children, playing on the grass and the gravel paths while a parent or nanny looks on.

Nearby, however, in another part of the hospital complex, it’s another story—and not one for the faint of heart.

The Catacombs of Paris, “the empire of death,” as it says at the entrance, are all the rage for teens and young adults looking for the morbid, giggly thrill of following tunnels lined with millions of bones. But for something truly frightening, Saint Louis’s Musée des Moulages (Museum of Molds, open by appointment and during late-September Heritage Days) is a serious medical house of horrors. It displays wax models of actual tumors, infection and disease, including numerous examples of what has been called “the French disease,” syphilis. Children 12 and under are not allowed in.

Created in 1885 for the purpose of teaching dermatology, the hospital’s historic specialty, the 4807-piece collection is the world’s largest of its kind. The collection and presentation have held Historical Monument status since 1992. One leaves here with a strong will to remain healthy and to wash one’s hand frequently. Here is a glimpse of the museum (commentary in French).

Leaving the museum, some visitors may then want to say a little prayer at the old chapel at the opposite edge of the hospital complex, some may want to return to the courtyard for some leafy contemplation, some may want to flee the hospital complex for a seat in a café by Canal Saint Martin to drink a toast to each other’s health. And we can all rejoice in the discovery of penicillin.

Hôpital Saint Louis – Musée des Moulages. The hospital complex can be entered at 1 avenue Claude Vellefaux or 16 rue de la Grange aux Belles (12 rue de la Grande aux Belles for the chapel), 10th arrondissement. Metro Colonel Fabien or Goncourt, though if visiting the canal area as well you can approach from République. The historic entrance at the end of Avenue Richerand is currently closed for security reasons.

The courtyard of the Hôpital Saint Louis is open weekdays and entrance is free. The chapel is open Mon.-Fri. 2:30-5pm, except for holidays, and Sun. 10:30-12:00am. From late July to late August it is closed except during weekly or twice-weekly mass.

The Museum of Molds (at Porte 14, Secteur Gris) is open by appointment only, Mon.-Fri., 9am-4:30pm, by calling 01 42 49 99 15 or writing to musee.moulages@sls.aphp.fr. Also open during late-September Heritage Days. Visitors must be more than 12 years old. Entrance: 6€ (3€ for students), 7.50€ for visit with presentation in France. Audio-guides available in English for 2€.

Salles de garde: hospital pornography for young doctors

Combine morbidity and sex and you get the salle de garde, the dining room and hang-out for young doctors in their medical residency and other medical staff. At Saint Louis and other public hospitals throughout Paris, salles de garde are normally off-limits to visitors—and it’s probably better that way. Where young doctors may have once dined in refectories surrounded by portraits of the great figures in medicine that preceded them, many now eat among an orgiastic free-for-all of licentious art. This 20^th-century tradition, still alive and well, apparently helps keep the stench of death and disease at bay. In fact, among the codes of conduct of the salle de garde is the possibility to “Laugh at everything, at death, at omnipresent suffering, at religion, at patients. To counterbalance misfortune, the salle de garde becomes a place of pleasure and of boisterous pleasure.” The quote is from a document put out by the Public Hospital Administration of Paris. To see what French interns are contemplating when away from their patients, check out the website operated by the Association des Salles de garde (you must be 18 or older to enter the site). For a State-sanctioned illustrated study on the subject see here.

© 2015/2016, Gary Lee Kraut. An earlier version of this article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of the British publication The Connexion.

Continue to Part 2 of Paris Hospitals and Medical Museums

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The Pasteur Museum: Pasteurization, vaccination and a beautiful crypt

Public health was on the upswing in the late 19th century in part thanks to the work of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). The Pasteur Museum and Institute, in the 15^th arrondissement, is a reminder of the positive effects of the famous scientist’s work on our daily lives. And Pasteur himself is buried in the basement in one of Paris’s most beautiful crypts.

It’s rare to have a scientist’s name given to a method rather than to an object or measurement, but pasteurization—partial sterilization enabling the demise of undesirable organisms—is known throughout the world. Beyond the reliable dairy products so associated with pasteurization, each time we lift a glass a beer or wine we can toast the great chemist. In fact, Pasteur discovered the benefit of heating wine before the benefit of heating milk when Napoleon III was looking to keep the wine sent to his soldiers from going bad. We can also pet the neighbor’s dog in peace thanks to Pasteur’s work in developing a vaccine for rabies.

Pasteur’s professional work as a chemist who came to practice biology had enormous implications on hygiene and medicine, and the institute that bears his name continues to work throughout the world to create vaccines and to eradicate disease.

The Pasteur Museum is an excellent introduction into his life and scientific times. It is part exhibition about his scientific accomplishments and discoveries through original instruments (explanations available in English), part tour of his apartment within the original building of the Pasteur Foundation. Ten pastels portraits that he drew between the ages of 13 and 20, hanging in his bedroom and in the dining room, unexpectedly reveal Pasteur to be an admirable visual artist before he turned to science. Being able to draw what one saw under the microscope was nevertheless an important skill for a 19th-century scientist.

The unexpected pleasure of a visit here is the chance to descend into the beautiful crypt where he and his wife are buried. For cryptophiles it alone is worth a visit to the Pasteur Museum. Inspired by the 5th-century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy, the neo-Byzantine curves and remarkable mosaics form an ensemble that one would more likely associate with nobility or with a saint. Pasteur’s dark green granite tomb occupies the center of the crypt. His wife, who died 15 years after Pasteur, is buried by the altar.

The original building of the Pasteur Foundation, in which the museum is located, is part of the vast complex of the Pasteur Institute which includes departments for research, education and vaccination. The original foundation building was funded by “national subscription,” a form of crowdfunding at the time. The Pasteur Institute is a private institution. Nearly half of the Pasteur Institute’s budget comes from income from its own activities, just over one quarter is subsidized by the State and about a quarter comes from donations and real estate assets.

Pasteur didn’t travel much, but he asked his students to deal with local health and hygiene problems wherever they may go, leading to what has been called “scientific evangelization” as his work and emphasis on the scientific method spread around the world. In addition to the Paris headquarters, there are 32 Pasteur Institutes around the world, employing 2400 people in more than 60 countries.

Pasteur left behind a detailed trace of his actions and methods in studies, letters and other documents. Due to the importance and extent of his work, the Pasteur archives have recently been listed in UNESCO’s International World Register of the Memory of the World. Those archives are maintained and have been digitized by the Academy of Sciences and the National Library of France.

Musée Pasteur / Institut Pasteur, 25 rue du Docteur Roux, 15^th arrondissement. Metro Pasteur. Open Mon.-Fri. except for holiday and August. Visits at 2pm, 3pm and 4pm, without reservation for individuals. Visitors must show ID to enter the Institut Pasteur complex in which the museum is located. Adults: 7 €. Students and children: 3€. Reservations required for groups.

Musée Curie and the treatment of cancer

The free little museum at the Curie Institute (5^th arrondissement) provides an introduction to radioactivity, radiation therapy and the life of double Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie (1867-1934) and her husband Pierre (1859-1906), with whom she shared her first Nobel.

Born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Marie arrived in Paris in 1891 to continue scientific studies that she had begun in Poland. She married the French scientist Pierre Curie in 1895. Together the Curies discovered radioactivity through polonium and radium. They shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903 with Henri Bequerel for their research into radiation. Marie thus became the first woman to receive the Nobel. Pierre’s life was cut short in 1906 when he was run over by a horse-drawn carriage. In 1909 the University of Paris and the Pasteur Institute joined forces to create the Radium Institute with her at the helm. She later received a second Nobel for chemistry for her work into polonium and radium, making the first double winner, man or woman, in different fields.

Once the scythe of WWI and the flu pandemic of 1918 had passed and the work of Pasteur and others had paved the way for improved and increasingly extensive vaccination, cancer was recognized as a major killer in France. While the virtues of radium therapy had been known since the early 1900s, channeling it for therapeutic value remained a work in progress. The Curie Foundation, which opened in 1922, became the first center in France devoted to fighting cancer with radiation therapy.

Marie Curie died of leukemia in 1934. The following year the Curie’s daughter and son-in-law also received the Nobel in chemistry for their discovery of artificial radioactivity.

The Radium Institute and the Curie Foundation merged in 1970 to form the Curie Institute. This little museum occupies the ground floor of the building where Marie had her office, which can be seen as she knew it. Research, education and cancer treatment are the institute’s aims. About 50% of its research funds come from the State, while medical insurance covers 100% of medical care provided by the institute.

In 1995, the ashes of Pierre and Marie Curie were transferred to the Pantheon, just around the corner from her office and from the museum. She thus became the first woman to enter the Pantheon for her own achievements.

Musée Curie, 1 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 5^th arrondissement. RER Luxembourg. Open Wed.-Sat. 1-5pm. Closed holidays and August and for two weeks late December-early January. Entrance is free, while donations are welcome.

Val de Grâce and the Museum of Health Service of the Armed Forces

In 1670, 14 years after decreeing the creation of the “general hospital” of La Salpêtrière, Louis XIV decreed the construction of a royal “hostel” to lodge officers and soldiers who were disabled, old or obsolete: Les Invalides. More than 6,000 men were admitted at Les Invalides between 1676 and 1690.

One visits the complex now as the Army Museum and as the site of Napoleon’s tomb beneath the great dome, yet portions of the Hôtel National des Invalides still provide medical services for veterans.

But it’s at Val de Grâce, the military and teaching hospital the 5^th arrondissement, where you’ll find the Museum of Health Service of the Armed Forces (Musée du Service de Santé des Armées). This museum is so rarely visited that coming here you might feel like an intruder in the defense department, or an honored guest.

The central structure of the Val de Grâce complex was originally built as convent under the patronage of Anne of Austria in thanks for having given birth to a son, the future Louis XIV, after nearly 23 years of marriage. During the French Revolution, the convent was transformed into a military and teaching hospital, and it has remained so ever since.

Entrance the museum also gains access to the Baroque chapel of Val de Grace, one of the jewels of 17th-century religious architecture in Paris, as well as to the convent cloister. The museum occupies a portion of the cloister complex.

While covering much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the museum is particularly informative concerning the medical needs, care and developments of those wounded during the First World War. The war’s destructiveness brought forth the massive need for medical intervention to deal with the effects of bullets, shrapnel, explosion, mustard gas, horrific conditions in the trenches (rats, malaria, “sick” water), psychological trauma and the flu pandemic.

The State created the museum during that war to show the public the efforts that were being made on behalf of the “poilus,” as the French infantrymen were known. A major display (to be avoided perhaps by children for its grotesqueness) is wax models of the faces of the men were made unrecognizable by artillery wounds, known as “les gueules cassées” in French. The models—considered a medical success story for the army—show faces before and after maxilla-facial surgery, a field with more than ample patients to study and improve their techniques.

Musée du Service de Santé des Armées, 1 place Alphonse Laveran, 5^th arrondissement. RER Port-Royal. Open Tues., Wed., Thurs., Sat., Sun. noon-6pm. Closed Jan. 1, Dee. 25 and the month of August. Entrance: 5€.

George Orwell fleeing a Paris hospital

If, after touring the hospital and medical heritage of Paris, you’d like good bedtime hospital horror story, read George Orwell’s essay How the Poor Die. Published in 1946, the brief essay is based on his experience in the public ward of Cochin Hospital (14^th arr.), which he refers to as Hôpital X, where he spent two weeks when suffering from flu or pneumonia.

“During my first hour in the Hôpital X,” he wrote, “I had had a whole series of different and contradictory treatments, but this was misleading, for in general you got very little treatment at all, either good or bad, unless you were ill in some interesting and instructive way….As a non-paying patient, in the uniform nightshirt, you were primarily a specimen, a thing I did not resent but could never quite get used to…. It was not the only hospital I have fled from, but its gloom and bareness, its sickly smell and, above all, something in its mental atmosphere stand out in my memory as exceptional….For it was a hospital in which not the methods, perhaps, but something of the atmosphere of the nineteenth century had managed to survive, and therein lay its peculiar interest….”

Hopefully what will stand out in your memory as you visit these hospitals and museums is something more cheerful. And we can all toast: Santé!

Return to Part 1 of Hospital and Medical Heritage in Paris

© 2015/2016, Gary Lee Kraut. An earlier version of this article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of the British publication The Connexion.

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