PRESENTATION

The "Association des Amis du Patrimoine Médical de Marseille" was founded by Professor Yves BAILLE in 1996. Its aim is to "collect, preserve, highlight, display the cultural, material, medical, pharmaceutical and odontological heritage of Marseilles and open it widely to a public whether expert or not in this field".

The association has already organized several temporary exhibitions and published numerous articles and books on the history of medicine. Since 2001, a number of lectures, open to all, have been a real success.

Besides the information on the activities of the association and particularly those on the lectures, there is a team that livens up this site and whose aim is to provide a certain number of columns with the latest news on a monthly basis :

• The article of the month  It’s a short text in connection with some aspects of the history of medicine in Marseilles or in Provence.
• The object of the month It consists in focusing on an instrument used in the past for medical treatment in surgery, pharmacy or odontology and borrowed from the association or from some members’ private collections. The picture showing the instrument comes with a short text in connection with the time of manufacture and user instructions.
• The photo album will be enhanced with old photos, postcards, documents from archives, references to the history of public health activity in the city.
• Gems of archives the visitor will find some extracts from medical or administrative texts in connection with day to day incidents as well as reminders of regulations which today have become obsolete.
• Strolling in the streets of Marseille The local council chose to honor some doctors by giving their names to streets or squares and even to some specific places in the city. The public, more often, knows nothing about those doctors and why they were honored. This is an opportunity to remind us of who they were through a short biography.

Please, see below:

• the Association statutes
• the Board of Directors
• the Committee
• the working group
• the membership form
• the internet site
  

Summary of articles :

Thursday 8th January 2026
"Painter's block", Pr Eric Barthélémy
Creating a work of art is the result of a long process. The artist has to make technical, plastic and semantic choices… But the original spark that Cézanne would call " ma petite sensation" , is in fact the choice of the subject. It is commonly believed that it depends on the artist's goodwill only. In fact, the artist often has to comply with rules, conventions and customs that all vary according to cultures and ages. In the XVIIth century for instance, the very influential royal academy of painting and sculpture imposed a hierarchy among pictorial genres : historical painting was the most valued one, in comparison with still-life paintings. From the XIXth century and the XXth century,mostly, artists started contravening those academic rules, aspiring to more freedom. Time had come for new opportunities. Starting from a selection of works of art selected in western painting, we will analyse how artists managed to free themselves from various constraints, such as a master's influence, a sponsor's demands, or the rules of the academy, thus developing their personal style. We will also see that artistic creation is an endless challenge and that the "painter's block", far from being paralysing, is also the incentive to creation.

Thursday 12th March 2026
"If the Lamoricière were told to me", Dr Marc Borgnetta
Some shipwrecks are better known than others: that of the Titanic in the North Atlantic is the most famous one. Unfortunately, the Mediterranean is just as bad as this ocean, and was the stage of quite a number of hazards. One of the most striking shipwrecks was that of the Lamoricîere, one of the most majestic liners of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. Indeed, on January 6th, 1942, as it was sailing from Algiers to Marseilles, it was trapped in a particularly violent tempest and sank off the coast of Minorca. Out of the 300 people or so present on board, only about 30 survived. This tragedy, plunging many families from Marseilles into mourning, affected people for a long time and highlighted the very precarious condition of some French sea routes during the Second World War. In 2005, a team of wreck hunters started searching for it. Did they find it? You will soon discover.

Thursday 19th March 2026
"Printed naturalist art since the Renaissance", Jean-Yves Meunier, entomologist and expert ecologist.
From prehistoric times, man has always tried to reproduce, through drawing, the nature that surrounds us, particularly hunted animals. Later, thanks to the invention of printing in the XVth century, the rise of books largely influenced the rise of science with a revival of observation from nature during the Renaissance and its necessary reproduction on paper.The evolution of engraving techniques - on wood, end-grain wood, copper, lithography- helped develop and improve the naturalistic representation that was going to support scientific research, thanks to the quality of illustrations, and would eventually position itself at the interface between science and art.