Desgenettes (1762-1837). Un homme de réseau dans la transformation de l'art de guérir
Thèse soutenue le 30 avril 2016
Bernard Loustalot
Abstract
René Nicolas Dufriche des Genettes, known as Desgenettes, is a physician whose life spanned two centuries. He lived through a turbulent period on both the political and military levels. He had thus the opportunity to meet several historical characters such as Benjamin Franklin, madame Rolland and above all Napoléon Bonaparte himself. As a regular participant in the salons he was a witness to the transformation of the French society rather than to the political events, which he described in his unfinished Mémoires. As chief medical officer of Bonaparte’s then Napoléon’s armies he followed several -if not all- of the great general’s campaigns. His career went on after the Empire, through the ups and downs of politics.
A historical character himself, he first of all played a role in military medicine in the Var army, the Italian Campaign, in Egypt and in the Great Army after 1807, for which he is mostly remembered. There are two great achievements to his credit: his inoculation of the plague, which, far from being insane, is in keeping with the knowledge of the time, and his opposition to Bonaparte about the poisoning of the plague-stricken people in Jaffa. Given the strong personalities of the protagonists, it raised key issues: the ethical aspects of euthanasia and the physicians’ subordination to the administration. On a routine basis he managed the Health Service, which had to be adapted daily, depending on the daily movements and the situation of a disparate army getting bigger and bigger, often deployed in foreign countries and struck with frequent and deadly epidemics.
Moreover Desgenettes also had a significant civilian activity first as a scientist with some publications about the absorbing system (lymphatic), education (the teaching of anatomy), the dissemination of knowledge by taking part in the publication of several journals, and also as a Professor of Hygiene at the Medical School and then the Faculty of Medicine of Paris. Besides it is as the mayor of the 10th arrondissement of Paris, Professor of Hygiene and a member of numerous committees that he will be faced in 1832 with the first modern plague epidemic: the Cholera morbus.