Hygiene et medecine: Histoire et actualite des maladies nosocomiales (review)

This sumptuous folio-sized book comes beautifully boxed. At first I was dismissive, thinking it might be a medical "coffee-table book," more for display than for serious reading—but I was wrong. On closer inspection I found that this work has much to commend it, not just for bibliophiles and amateur historians of medicine, but for professional historians of medicine as well.

About three-fourths of the book is a straightforward narrative account of the history of hospitals and infectious hospital diseases. After a general coverage of medicine and hygiene from antiquity through the early modern era, Jean-Marie Galmiche focuses on Parisian hospitals, with an emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is familiar territory to the historian of French or European medicine. Galmiche discusses the medical revolution, the Paris clinical school, and the era of bacteriology. He then moves on to describe principal twentieth-century developments, including changes in hygiene and public health, the transformation of the hospital (with special emphasis on hospital architecture), and the scientific discoveries and technological innovations that revolutionized medicine and the hospital. He provides an eminently readable account.

The other part of the book—about one hundred pages—is what Galmiche calls a novella. This is surprisingly intriguing. I was skeptical, but once I began reading "Les mémoires de Valentin Fougère ou la vie quotidienne d'un malade hospitalisé en 1850 à l'Hôtel-Dieu de Paris," I found it so gripping that I could not put it down. Although a bit contrived, this fictional account, based on numerous primary and secondary sources, succeeds in conveying a real sense of what it was like to be a hospital patient in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. The novella, like the whole book, is lavishly illustrated, with maps, composite drawings, and scenes from Paris that contextualize the hospital stay. Recipes for commonly used medications and charts of hospital diets enrich the story.

Academics may wish for more historiographic sophistication, but given that the author's goal is to provide a carefully researched, well-written, and beautifully illustrated book for a broad audience, I think we can appreciate the strengths of the volume. Many of the copious illustrations—the hospitals of Paris, maps, surgical instruments, hospital furnishings—will be familiar to historians of nineteenth-century medicine. The advantage here is the quality of the reproductions, the folio size, and the fact that they are all conveniently assembled in one volume. Although there is no list of illustrations and tables, I counted 150 of them, many of which are full-page.

With one exception, Galmiche's many sources are French—the exception being Erwin Ackerknecht's Medicine at the Paris Hospital (1967) in French translation. There is only a proper name index. Since Galmiche intends this as a reference work, a topical index as well as an accompanying list of illustrations and tables would have been helpful. All in all, however, historians of medicine will find this a useful, pleasurable book (although they may wish the author had included some of the recent contributions by scholars outside France). Galmiche is to be congratulated on producing such a handsome, elegant volume.