Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings

3 Charles Daremberg, His Friend

C H A P T E R T H R E E Charles Daremberg, His Friend Émile Littré, and Positivist Medical History Danielle Gourevitch In mid-nineteenth-century France, a strong positivist program developed in medical history, based on the philosophy of Auguste Comte (1795–1857)—which in turn had been inspired by that of Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Hegel. Comte’s main book was Cours de philosophie positive (1839–1842), which brought him enthusiastic disciples, all of them convinced that the human race is perfectible and that this can be proved by historical studies. An extraordinary encounter between philosophy , philology, and medicine then occurred, and the positivist ideals informed several kinds of historical work—little teaching, some writing, and much editing of Greek and Latin texts, ancient and medieval. Why was it so important? Every medical man was then aware that a new medicine was being born: with the French revolution, universities had been suppressed while nonacademic institutions, such as the Collège de France and the Muséum, were fostered, with their highly specialized teaching. Clinical medicine developed, with patients concentrated in the hospitals in the large cities giving students an enormous range of human material to observe. Experimental methods , specialization, figures, and facts became pivotal to the new scientific medicine . Daremberg’s motto, ‘‘for history, texts; for science, facts,’’ stressed the link between the new medicine and the history of its past, and the historical move- 54 Traditions ment had a philosophical stance that encouraged collecting manuscripts, searching for unknown texts, and translating them in order to make them available to a medical audience unfamiliar with Greek and Latin. The key figures of the movement were Auguste Comte and two medical historians , Émile Littré (1801–1881) and Charles Daremberg (1817–1872). Both had studied medicine but did not really practice; both had a passion for ancient Greek. For both, historical work expressed a positivist commitment, but, as I will show, not to the same extent: Littré was an activist, while Daremberg was far from being a militant. Littré is best known for his edition and translation of Hipppocrates,1 but not everybody realized that he was also the author of the Dictionnaire historique de la langue française. Daremberg is best known for his translation of many Galenic works,2 although many did not know that he also promoted the Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines. In trying to understand the work of Daremberg and Littré, it is necessary to see them as members of a wider network of men across Europe. They shared common tastes and scientific ideals but varied widely in their personal background: a German Jew in Halle, Julius Rosenbaum; a respectable gentleman in Oxford, then in Hastings, William Alexander Greenhill; a nonconformist Neapolitan, Salvatore de Renzi; a bilingual Belgian doctor, responsible for an important hospital in Antwerp and the father of a large family, Corneille or Cornelius Broeckx; an abandoned child, born and reared in Dijon, then a doctor without a practice in Paris, Daremberg; and an ugly little man, worshipper of Comte, Littré. They did not all choose medical history for identical reasons, nor did they all write history in the same way. I intend to focus on Daremberg because I know him well, almost as a friend; for years I studied his unpublished archives in Paris, London, and Oxford, and I organized a symposium about him and his friends.3 I became interested in Daremberg because he exemplifies, but without excess as Littré does, one of the central currents in nineteenth-century medical history, one that even at that time competed with other visions of what medical history ought to be and what purposes it would serve. He embodied a positivist vision that had enduring consequences for medical historical understanding and for the conduct of medical history through the present day. This view pervaded even some scholars of the German romantic school of history, such as Heinrich Haeser (1811–1885); the third edition of his Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medizin,4 a perfect example of Quellenforschung (research based on primary sources), was deeply influenced by the recent experimental physiology and by French positivism, and, therefore was dedicated to Daremberg , Henschel, and De Renzi.5 Charles Daremberg and Positivist Medical History 55 Daremberg: Doctor, Librarian, Manuscript Hunter, and Translator Charles Daremberg was born in secret in 1817, in Dijon, in the house of a midwife...