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14/05/08 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : actualités Parkinson 2008 Café des Arts place Yves Klein Nice 06000 29/05/08 Conférence Jean-Luc Delut : la musique du XIXème siècle : Beethoven 4Bd de Cimiez le Majestic NICE 06000 30/05/08 Conférence Pierre Lemarquis : Musique et Alzheimer Hôpital de Cimiez Nice 06000 14/06/08 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : Paramnésie reduplicative ( Magritte et la neurologie) 15/09/08 Conférences Benoit Kullmann : le concept de maladie neurodégénérative ; la paralysie supranucléaire progressive, naissance et démembrement ; le neurologue, entre dégénérescence cortico-basale et syndrôme cortico-basal : IUGM, Montréal 9H-12h 17/09/08 Conférence Pierre Lemarquis : la cognition motrice à travers l'exemple de Glenn Gould Centre des Sciences de Montreal 22/09/08 Conférences Benoit Kullmann : les démences fronto-temporales ; la chorée de Huntington IUGM, Montréal 9H-12h 23/09/08 Conférences Benoit Kullmann : la démence à corps de Lewy ; les atrophies multi-systémiques ; le neurologue et l'hystérie IUGM, Montréal 9H-12h 2/10/08 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : la neurologie au féminin 21/10/08 Conférence Jean-Luc Delut : la musique du XIXème siècle : Schubert 25/10/08 Conférence Pierre Lemarquis : Musique et Dopamine 2nd World Congress on Controversies in Neurology Athènes 20/11/08 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : variations sur la maladie d'Alzheimer I 12/12/08 Conférence Pierre Lemarquis : De Jean-Sébastien Bach à la Télécommande cérébrale CVCI 13/12/08 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : le sens de la douleur ; Apollon et Marsyas 16/01/10 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : le regard et l'image mentale 05/02/09 Conférence Jean-Luc Delut : De Jean-Sébastien Bach à la Télécommande cérébrale CVCI 07/02/09 Conférence Pierre Lemarquis : Musique et Alzheimer 18/04/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : Inhibition et créativité 12/05/09 Conférence Michel Borg : Actualités de la maladie de Parkinson 12/05/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : Peinture et dopamine 12/05/09 Conférence Pierre Lemarquis : Musique et dopamine 13/06/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : de la chéloniophilie 20/06/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : Paul Richer et l'environnement artistique de Charcot 04/07/09 Concert Francine Guillouët - De Salvador : Schubert 04/07/09 Conférence Jean-Luc Delut : Schubert 08/07/09 Conférence Oury Monchi : Neuroimagerie fonctionnelle des connexions fronto-striatales : Neuroimaging studies in Parkinson¹s disease. Centre Hospitalier Princesse Grace, Monaco 17 H 09/09/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : Fiat Lux : de la musique des sphères aux couleurs de l'arc-en-ciel Dusseldorf 09/09/09 Conférence Pierre Lemarquis : Lux Fiat : Et la lumière fut: "J.S.Bach, du cerveau bien tempéré à la théorie du chaos : cerveau, musique et mathématiques Dusseldorf 19/09/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : Magritte et la mémoire 08/10/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : l'image, entre virtuel et actuel C.U.M 21 H 26/11/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : L'esprit faux : du cerveau des facultés au cerveau des catégories 01/12/09 Conférence Michel Borg : Parkinson et dépression 01/12/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : l'art et le prosélytisme de la dépression 03/12/09 Conférence Jean-Luc Delut : Bach III ; rhétorique de la musique 05/12/09 Conférence Philippe Barrès : le What et le Where 05/12/09 Conférence Sandrine Louchart de la Chapelle : mémoires et émotions : « Une nouvelle dimension de la mémoire humaine » 08/12/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : douleur et théorie de l'esprit 09/12/09 Conférence Bruno Lussiez : anatomie de la crucifixion (association ARD, invitation du Dr Haiel Alchaar, fondateur) 09/12/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : de la poétique à la politique de la douleur (association ARD, invitation du Dr Haiel Alchaar, fondateur) xx/12/09 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : le cerveau est-il une machine ? 16/01/10 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : le regard et l'image mentale 27/02/10 Conférence Pierre Lemarquis : Sérénade pour un cerveau musicien : plasticité neuronale 27/02/10 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : L'esprit faux : un cerveau en matière plastique ? 06/03/10 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : la construction du cerveau, I : Schémas Ajaccio, Corse 25/03/10 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : les démences de type Alzheimer : actualisation des concepts, actualité thérapeutique 10-17/04/10 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : un neurologue en visite au musée de Montréal 10-17/04/10 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : le concept de maladie neurodégénératives : nouvelles perspectives Montréal 27-30/04/10 Présentation Benoit Kullmann : JNLF Lyon 29/05/10 Conférences Benoit Kullmann : Les dysprosodies 5/06/10 Conférence Benoit Kullmann : la naissance de la peinture (l'ombre au tableau) Séville |
Conférences - Céline's double deception
Louis Destouches/Céline, a double imposture conference held on 22 May 1999 as part of the Celine Day organized by Association of Ideas, then published in the French Psychiatry Letter.  Louis Destouches (1894-1961), M.D., supported a thesis on the life and work of Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis, Hungarian physician born in Budapest in 1818, died in Vienna in 1865, who according to medical History was the inventor of asepsis.  Sixty pages are enough to describe the fate of a hero of Medicine, sure of the correctness of his views against the consensus, a victim of misunderstanding of his contemporaries, who died as a martyr for his beliefs. Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis Raised in Pest, the adolescent Philippe-Ignace leaves his homeland and goes to Vienna to learn the law. Without enthusiasm : he soon turns to medicine after attending without warning his parents at pathology lessons and then at an autopsy. He follows the teaching of Skoda, one of the great figures of Vienna Medical University, meets Rokitanski, the first Professor of Pathology. Fascinated, the young Hungarian work to exhaustion, demonstrating extreme sensitivity and an inability to cope with Austrian students who mocked his manners and his accent. He returned for the first time in Budapest, take an inscription at the new School of Medicine newly opened ; he criticizes without diplomacy the teaching, writes in bad Latin a dozen pages on plant life and joins his Master Skoda in Vienna. In 1846 he wins competitions on the title of surgeon : hold this position in the mid-nineteenth century, does not at risk of excessive optimism, nine out of ten speeches ending with a exitus. Note Semmelweis clearly "what is happening here seems to me unnecessary deaths succeed with simplicity." The absence of the post away to obstetrics: when he was appointed assistant professor of Klin, which operates one of the two pavilions of the General Hospice in Vienna where we came from birth. The other department is headed by Professor Bartch. When he takes office, Semmelweis is facing a very special situation : according to a principle of alternation of admissions, each of the departments hosts a day on two patients reaching pregnancy's term. But the days of receipt in the Klin's department, women begged for an admission to Bartch's, some of them up to prefer to give birth in the street ... The reason is that one dies much more in Klin's than in Bartch's, from the famous puerperal fever, which killed one woman in five in the nineteenth century in the days after childbirth. The statistics show a comparable impact of this terrible disease, both in Paris and Edinburgh, Berlin and Turin ... Destouches put the figure of 96% mortality in Klin's department, lacking recruitment, the clientele being mainly prostitutes, husbandless mothers and other frowned. All kinds of reasons are spelled : the quality of milk, humidity conditions, telluric and cosmic causes. More medically, touching done to judge the opening of the cervix would cause inflammation especially if it is done by inexperienced and brutal students and not by skilled and soft midwives. However, the Klin welcomes medical students, while the service is frequented by Bartch future midwives. Semmelweis shifting from observation to experimentation proposes to exchange students against midwives : Klin' statistics calm down, those of Bartch dramatically worsen. Part of the students is expelled, Klin explaining that foreign students spread puerperal fever ; while he gets angry against his hungarian assistant. Who takes a decisive step when asked about what distinguishes the two groups of paramedics : he noticed that apprentices doctors practiced autopsies, and not the future midwives. The death of his friend Kollechka, a surgeon, as a result of anatomical injury, suites which run at any point comparable to that of puerperal fever, confirmed his hunch : invisible particles are transferred from one corpse to a living being, whether by a touch or a scalpel wound. Semmelweis did not for a moment thought that these particles could be living organisms, much less bacteria : Louis Pasteur will not build the principles of bacteriology before 1865 when he study the diseases of silkworms. But noting that the corpses and pus emit an odor, Semmelweis proposes to deodorize the hands of students before they affect pregnant women : after himself infected five women when it came to examine a patient suffering from a cervix cancer, he requires washing hands in a solution of chloride of lime, ie, bleach.  The mortality rate collapses. Semmelweis, then aged thirty years, has invented asepsis, from a careful observation and without any Scientific Concept. It remains to convince his peers. If Skoda, Hebra, Rokitanski are at his side, their authority is not enough to sway the extraordinary indifference, even hostility, of most of their colleagues. So that Semmelweis was revoked in 1849 and banished from Vienna. He returned to Budapest, which was booming, the Hungarian trying unsuccessfully to wrest their independence from the Austrian Trust. It survived in wretched conditions. Seven years later, a German doctor commits suicide after realizing he had caused the death of his patients fault for not having respected the precautions identified by Semmelweis. This learning this dismal news, then prepares a booklet, the etiology of puerperal fever, which accompanies the publication of an open letter to all teachers of obstetrics, where he described his collegues as bluntly criminals "for I think there is no other way to treat them as murderers. " This denunciation did the strengthening of attitudes and hateful. The famous obstetrician Dubois he tried to convince in Paris, said his method obsolete.  Following the tragic events is : Semmelweis dark into madness, Louis Destouches reports posters put up on the walls of Budapest denouncing the risks involved when using an obstretician ... his few last friends led to the mentally ill house in Vienna. The thesis of Louis Destouches ends with the apocalyptic description of an autopsy in which Semmelweis sloppy and screaming takes a scalpel, feverishly dissecting a corpse, injures himself and becomes infected ... He died on 16 August 1865 aged 47 years. We draw here this episode in the history of asepsis without style, simple sequence of facts and dates, where we emphasized the highlights of reasoning and briefly describes the difficulties of a forerunner doctor when he pretends changing his colleagues habits. How Louis Destouches worked from that frame, is the first purpose of this conference. Louis Destouches Semmelweis's life is undoubtedly a fine thesis topic, which was probably set during a conversation with his stepfather, Professor Follet, director of the medical school of Rennes and infectious disease specialist. This story mixes indeed an unusual destiny and a particularly poignant example of a medical discovery disrupted by dramatic events that precipitate reasoning, hasten conclusions, in the atmosphere of the Austro-Hungarian empire crisis, where political opposition reinforce individual rivalries, in a theater where one died while giving birth, where one can feel the smell of dead and dying, and where the most glaring discovery encounters indifference and hostility of a caste. Let us say quite clearly, the beauty of the subject is the only concession that we give to Louis Destouches. We would now provide some details of his vocation, his education and early years of his medical practice. After a turbulent adolescence, the interruption of high school, stays in Nice, England, in Lower Saxony, after an approximate learning of hosiery and jewelry trade, Louis Destouches aged 18 undertakes October 1912 in the 12th regiment Cuirassier. Very early in the great war, he was wounded at Ypres by a bullet in the right arm which earned him to receive the Military Medal. After he was reformed, he stays in London in 1915, in Cameroon in 1916, where he is employed by a forestry company, dealing with cocoa plantations. Then he returns to France in 1917, living in small works, delivery, factotum, Secretary. Recruited by the Rockefeller mission in the fight against tuberculosis, it becomes itinerant speaker, making lectures in schools, flying the campaign in an Hygiene caravan.  The war ended, he spent two Bachot, then met in Rennes Dr. Athanase Follet whose daughter he married Edith in 1919. He passed the tests of PCBs in 1920, his military background and his veteran status allowing him to complete his medical degree in less than five years. It was never an Interne, and notes he made at different stages of their studies do not suppose him as a hard worker. His penchant for scientific research will never be more than the stage of amateurism and its contribution has resulted in a study on convoluta Roscoffensis, then Gallerai mellonella, a publication on low bleeding gums in every-day medical practice, and finally a contribution to the development of a drug to restore the balance thyroïdo-ovarian, the Basedowine. In 1931, he wrote a promotional text for the launch of Nican Tablets, from the Cantin pharmaceutics, and contributed to the spread of a sleeping pill, the Somnothyril. The best way to avoid diagnostic difficulties when a disease is unknown, is to ensure that the diseases that we can not recognize do not occur. Destouches prepare a draft of Medicine clinic, pretentious titled "Doctrine of medical efficacy." After a dismal series of pious declarations of intent, stands just after resolving the issue of medical specialists, round tests for patients unnecessary (sic : in french, l’élimination par tests des malades inutiles). The poor medical skills of Destouches Louis, the inanity of his ideas, made him all naturally a champion of the style. In this regard, it is moving an idea that hangs over as a vicious migraine in the authors's brain : punctuation in Destouches subsequent works would be the result of Mrs. AC's whim ; this shorthand typist who received Céline bulk production would sown points and commas following his fantasy. Sorry to put an end to this Oulipian side of the celinian style, but the typography of the thesis first edition in 1924 is without appeal : the most myopic reader will recognize the celinian touch through the generosity with which are distributed as machine gun bursts the dots ... and surgically hit the exclamation points! Let us consider the way Celine treats the topic of the thesis : we can assess differently the introduction lyricism, the Bastille storming evocation, the regicide, the Revolutionary slaughter, the detours by Austerlitz, the incomprehensible allusion Corvisart, the passing tribute to Napoleon ... In this confusing introduction to the subject, devoid of any demonstration project, thesis literally, after which the reader will understand just by which side of the barricade stands Louis Destouches, succeeds Semmelweis miserabile childhood evocation. When we finally address the beginning of his Medical studies, it is under a fire of clichés, "but it is far from the desire of a father to the fate of his son! ", pompous tirades like " medicine in the universe, this is a feeling, a regret, a pity more active than others" ; provocative formulas, for example about the first autopsy that Semmelweis assists: "When Medicine questioned a corpse with a knife ..."  Joseph Lister L’archaïsme émouvant de la pensée de la contagion chez Semmelweis, entre odeur pestilentielle et désodorisation salvatrice, n’est nulle part replacé dans son contexte. Louis Destouches ne décrypte pas, il opacifie l’histoire sous un torrent de considérations déplacées. Il ne relate pas, il frelate. Beneath this deluge of comments, not much filters from the historical reflection that would have been needed on the development of medicine, on the Austro-Hungarian premicrobian coexisting theories, on the opposition between conclusions and proposals of Semmelweis and of Lister, the inventor of antisepsis and the discoverer of the eponymous disease, which are still the posthumous subject of controversy at the beginning of the Twentieth century. The archaic thinking of contagion in Semmelweis, between pestilential odor and salvatory by deodorization, is nowhere put in context. Louis Destouches does not decrypts, he rather opacifies history under a torrent of displaced considerations. But there is worse : the liberties Destouches takes with the facts are daunting. Falsified, the statistics! Professor Tiberius Gyory, Hungarian citizen, and a great admirer of Semmelweis, reacts to the publication in the journal La presse médicale of the contraction of the thesis under the title "the last days of Semmelweis", calling it huge exaggeration. The 96% mortality statistics advanced by Destouches was corrected by Pinart, rating between 16 and 31%. Falsified, several episodes in the life of Hungarian doctor : the posters have never existed, his death even is misreated, in a grandguignolesque staging : the poor Semmelweis who was actually injured in the discretion of the amphitheater sadly died at the hospice. Finally, and the height of intellectual dishonesty, reading these sixty pages could make one believe that Louis Destouches has rediscovered the martyr doctor, after sixty years of neglect. Nothing is further from the truth : no mention in Destouches's thesis of the asepsis hero rehabilitation, which demonstrates yet along an impressive series of articles and biographies, since Hegar's reading in Tubingen in 1882 : The Lancet, the most famous medical journal of the world titles "Monument to Semmelweis" in 1892 ; Rose in New York, Young in Boston, another Young in New Zealand, Blumberg in Berlin, Hergot in his treatise of obstetrics published in 1902, accumulate tributes and trace laudatory biographies. In 1906, the French Pinard delivers speech to inaugurate the monument dedicated to Semmelweil in Budapest.  Semmelweis's unhappy life as reworked by Louis Destouches is not an argument in the medical sense of the term. The work of the Hungarian has been widely commented, honors were rendered, the University is entitled Hungarian Semmelweis University at a time when Celine's brochure is being printed. It is not even a historical reading : approximations, low-to-close, omissions, are vying for the falsification and misrepresentation. At most, one can speak of an hysterical staging of the precursor's death. "The life and works of Semmelweis" is the venue for a meeting between Celine's thematic and Semmelweis's medical world : in the register of the body, death, disease, decay, pus, odors, worms. War adds wounds, blood, amputations, guts, the graves. In the social register, the mediocrity of many, bourgeois, professors and their stupidity, their pettiness, their intrigues, their pettiness, their resistance to the truth. In the moral register, the absurdity of destiny, despair on earth, the inexorably tragic fate of new ideas. Exposed in this light, Semmelweis is a double Louis Destouches : one is a forerunner, the other a prophet ; the first ran his life to misunderstanding, the second at his detractors, both condemned by the same Fatum.  Mariage d'Edith Follet et Louis-Ferdinand Céline This identification, however sounds out of tune : when he wrote his thesis, Louis Destouches is neither rejected nor even misunderstood : he lives very comfortably - albeit after a somewhat disjointed childhood - with his wife at his stepfather Professor of Medicine ; he meets and seduces important doctors who appreciate his wit and provide him protection. Still, he experienced the world of barracks and a short war and its horrors, but what are these experiences compared to those of most of his contemporaries? There would be a lot to say about the secondary benefits that the cuirassier Destouches has earned from its passage on the route of a ball dampened by a ricochet, and his prodigious Mythomania. Moreover he is not an author frustrated at this time of its existence : the drafting of the Voyage, conducted in a gentle family cocoon, was followed by a tremendous reception of Denoël the editor, then a favorable reaction of reading committees Gallimard, and a publication with 50,000 copies will be sold quickly. As cursed writer, one has known worse.  It seemed that Destouches, all identified to Semmelweis he tried to stand, would have to give very difficult to argue receive its share of his model tragic destiny. Poor practitioner, he has invented nothing, and practice medicine without panache or interest, which will not further his literary work; rejected, it was not yet in writing his thesis, on the contrary. The analogy lies elsewhere : on the one hand, the Hungarian doctor removed so vivid a mode of transmission of a contagious disease ; touching the identification of the causes of infection germs, discovered twenty years later by Louis Shepherd and reach the threshold of the definition of antisepsis, which will complete Lister. On the other hand, Louis Destouches, transposing the observations of Semmelweis in the domain of life, that he knew so bad, in the social register, far beyond the few that produce texts on hygiene, will be duty to denounce the world in his literary work, the germ that rots the Company. This microbe, this miasma, this parasite is, of course, the reader has guessed, the Jew Virus. Louis Destouches, medical health officer, becomes, then, Celine, purifying writer.  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Louis Lambert, conférence à l'Institut des Questions Juives, mai 1941 Docteur Benoît Kullmann Creation date : 28/05/2008 : 03:31 Reactions to this article
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