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 13 October 2022
“The Wonderful and Tragic History of the Early Days of General Anesthesia” by Jean-Louis Blanc
The advent of general anesthesia is one of the major milestones in the history of medicine. Until the mid-nineteenth century, methods for alleviating pain were virtually nonexistent, and as a result, surgery was underdeveloped. The elimination of surgical pain was achieved through the inhalation of gases: ether, nitrous oxide, and chloroform. The first procedure under ether was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston by surgeon Warren, with anesthesia administered by dentist William Morton in 1846. Its adoption spread extremely rapidly throughout Europe and the rest of the world. In Marseille, beginning in March 1847, Professor Etienne Villeneuve performed several obstetric procedures at the Maternity Hospital, as well as other procedures at the Hôtel-Dieu. After the first deaths occurred, chloroform replaced ether, and it was not until 1890 that ether regained favor among surgeons. As for nitrous oxide, it was recognized as very useful for short procedures such as tooth extractions and was introduced in Marseille in 1872 by Édouard Beltrami, who performed the first tooth extraction at the Hôtel-Dieu. In France, at the very beginning of the 20th century, the Ombrédanne mask greatly simplified anesthesia but the result was it slowed down research there, which, as a consequence, developed in the Anglo-Saxon world. Progress in France would then come after World War II, and gradually we witnessed the establishment of the discipline, the organization of its teaching through university chairs, and the development of services and then departments.

Thursday, November 17, 2022
“Professor Jean FIOLLE, His Era 1884–1955: From Surgeon to Writer“ by Robert Assadourian
In 1910, at the age of 26, Jean Fiolle had finished with competitive exams. Indeed, after passing two difficult exams, he was appointed hospital surgeon and professor at the medical school in Marseille. From 1910 to 1914, he was euphoric, as evidenced by his medical and non-medical publications. Among them, we note a novel co-authored by Jean and Paul Fiolle, Les Patibulaires, which was nominated for the 1913 Prix Goncourt. In 1914, everything was turned upside down!! As a war surgeon assigned to Auto-Chir 21, he advocated for rapid action and wide incisions in the wounded in two works published in 1916 and 1917. This message was heeded. After the war, which had left a deep mark on him, he resumed his surgical activities. He was appointed Clinical Professor of Surgery in 1933. Indeed, Marseille had become a Faculty of Medicine in 1930; he ended his career in 1955 at the Hôpital de la Timone. We will present this period through three aspects that define him: Jean Fiolle the Surgeon, Jean Fiolle the Painter, Jean Fiolle the Writer.

Thursday, December 15, 2022
“October 1934, the Canebière Massacre“ by Vincent Laforge
Sarajevo, Marseille, Dallas... Three cities that seemed to have nothing in common... and yet! In less than half a century, each of them was the scene of a political assassination attempt targeting a head of state. Carried out by Croatian Ustaše terrorists, the shooting on October 9, 1934, on the Canebière claimed the lives of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, a police officer, and two female bystanders. Europe in the early 1930s was not ready for war. The Marseille crime did not have the dramatic and almost immediate impact of the one in Sarajevo. Its consequences, however, would profoundly alter the European diplomatic landscape of the 1930s. While this tragedy is slowly fading from memory, it had, at the time, a considerable impact. As the first assassination to be filmed, its impact was comparable to that of the assassination of John F. Kennedy thirty years later. In both cases, the haste with which the investigation was conducted left the field open to proponents of conspiracy theories. For nearly eighty years, most writings on the case have accused the police of having brought grief to the Canebière. The authors of these popular works sometimes base their assertions on expert reports from the time, which they interpret without possessing the necessary technical knowledge. The most s More often than not, they simply repeat the conclusions of earlier studies. By directly examining contemporary sources—primarily from judicial archives and newsreels—the author was able to analyze, shot by shot, the gunfire exchanged between the terrorist and the police. The author, an emergency room physician from Marseille, a specialist in forensic ballistics, and a doctor of history, takes a critical look at the testimonies, autopsy reports, and the performance of the weapons used. His conclusions regarding responsibility for the Canebière massacre significantly differ from those of the authors mentioned earlier; for him, the assassin, Dimitrov Kerim Velitchko, is responsible for the deaths of the five victims and the injuries of the approximately ten wounded individuals. While he exonerates the French police of direct responsibility for the shooting, he cannot help but condemn them for the amateurism and carelessness they displayed in protecting the royal visit.

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.