Les Annales 1952
Source: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 1952, Vol. 7, No. 3;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2009.
Lucien Febvre judged with too much indulgence my article recently published in the “Annales historiques de la Révolution française” on the Reign of Terror during a time of epidemic [1]. A passage even seemed to him to be worthy of being “looked at more closely.” So once again Lucien Febvre will have posed a problem and encouraged research on a subject that is certainly important, but difficult to get a grasp of, since it is a matter of the “class hatred” which doctors have at times been victims of. I am happy that the “Annales” are allowing me to return to a question whose importance is worth the difficulty. We have just opened a file, and it is nearly empty. Yet we don’t claim to fill it. My ambition will be satisfied if I were to succeed in awakening curiosity, in arousing reflection or reactions. The collection of information completed, we could come to a conclusion, not on the value of the sentiment, but on its existence in the past.
I limited my research to the cholera of the years 1831 and 1832. I re-read the ‘Journal of a Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe, the same man who charmed our childhood with his “Robinson Crusoe.” A novelistic work, it reports the counsels of a London burger, well informed on the English epidemic of 1665, as much from his own observations as from those gleaned from others. He offered his recommendations to his fellow citizens when, the sickness having ravaged Provence in 1722, it was feared it would re-appear on the banks of the Thames. Finally,[2] I returned to the powerful studies of Georges Lefebvre on “The Great Fear” and “The Revolutionary Crowd.” [3]
It must be recognized: before 1789 this feeling of hatred didn’t leave many traces: the poor didn’t use the pen. Georges Lefebvre wrote that the masses spoke up for the first time in the assemblies of the Parisian sections; he also stressed the specific actions “of the aggregate and the gathering” [4], but the first precaution in time of contagion is always the isolation of the sick.
It also shouldn’t be forgotten that epidemics generally break out in times of famine. The first people struck were the under-nourished [5]. But if hunger makes dogs evil, the moment comes when it weakens them. In 1662 the Intendant of Normandy pointed out that, lacking food, the peasants had “fallen into a certain languor;” and Nacquart the Elder wrote to Colbert that the inhabitants of the regions of Orléans and Blois had become “weak and invalid,” incapable of accomplishing their work in the fields.[6] Did these unfortunates still have the strength to fight or to even put out their hands? Could they still think? Was it not for this reason that the people of London in 1665 were, according to Daniel Defoe, “very humble and submissive?” An explanation even more plausible in that the same author later speaks of the poor, who “were grown stupid...by their misery.” [7]
This torpor would have not kept the masses in a state of obedience if another precaution hadn’t been taken. Daniel Defoe hardly bothers to hide it: the Lord Mayor, the Council of Aldermen and the Justices of the Peace of the city outside its walls “were supported with money from all parts so well that the poor were kept quiet, as their wants were everywhere relieved.” [8] This should be understood in this way: leaders and bourgeois of London of 1722 learn the lesson and be generous if need be, for in 1665 calm was bought and paid for. We have here a new cause for the silence of the poor.
Another peremptory reason can be guessed out; let us listen again to Daniel Defoe. “And while, though a melancholy article in itself, yet was a deliverance in its kind; namely the plague, which raged in a dreadful manner...carried off in that time thirty or forty thousand of those very people which had they been left would have been an insufferable burden by their poverty...[They] would] first or last have put the whole nation, as well as the city, into the utmost terror and confusion.” [9]
We can thus understand that the documents concerning the sentiments of the poor towards the rich before 1789 are rare and perhaps nonexistent. This is the problem. In these conditions, whatever the dangers might be of this too confident indirect method, we think we can use the popular reactions in the face of the cholera of 1831-1832 in order to understand what they were at times of contagion before 1789. We fully understand the objection, which is a serious one: the Frenchman of 1832 had a different sensibility because he had lived through 1793; it was the Revolution of 1789 that gave birth to class antagonism, and that of 1830 reawakened it, precisely on the eve of the cholera. But let us learn of the reactions of 1832 and then give ourselves over to the game of suppositions-though this is forbidden to historians; and then let us ask if, had an epidemic been declared in the capitol, no voice would have been raised in the Gravilliers section in 1793 to call the aristocrats poisoners, and if that voice would have fallen into the void. As Georges Lefebvre noted, “a mentality is not constituted suddenly... Its germination goes far back into the past.” [10] And how could we believe that the reaction of the poor was specifically French if we find it at the same moment in England, Austria, and in Russia? Nevertheless, even if the data are gathered form the four corners of Europe, from both before and after 1789, they will probably remain fragmentary. Georges Lefebvre, speaking of the factors that determined the revolutionary mentality, observed that “the traces of their action are naturally not easy to discern and certainly difficult to bring together in reasonable quantities.” [11]. Attacking the study of the Great Fear he admitted: “It will doubtless be thought legitimate that seeking to explain [it] I attempted to place myself among those who felt it.” [12] The method, always delicate, is obviously scabrous: secretly you perhaps deplore the blindness of the masses, but since you must speak in the place of the poor, and you can hardly give them the language of the rich, it will occur that the tone will become plebian and they will perhaps doubt your equanimity. The risk is certain.
The investigation should not be limited to the months during which the epidemic raged. The announcing of the danger already provoked certain reflexes of interest.
Those who felt fear, in the usual sense of the word, the fear that is expressed in flight, are to be sought among the rich. Daniel Defoe tells us: “The better sort of people first took alarm and began to hurry themselves out of town.” [13] In March 1832 Londoners prepared themselves to imitate these ancestors; the Duchess of Dino wrote to the Baron of Barante, “The first society person who will be seriously attacked by the illness, I predict that the flight will become general.” [14] After his trip to Greece, where he had studied the plagues of 1827 and 1828, Gosse would write: “A fact that appeared to me to be nearly general is that the enlightened or wealthy classes were more susceptible than others to that fear that egoism engenders.” [15] In the France of 1832, as soon as cholera was spoken of the exodus began. Louis Blanc tells us that “most of the wealthy fled, the deputies fled, the Peers of France fled.” [16] Marshal Comte de Castellane noted in his journal: “Anyone who has more than 200,000 livres of income is horrifically frightened.” [17]
Nevertheless, there were wealthy individuals who remained in place, and it might be useful to know why. Daniel Defoe’s hero, who had at first left, returned, for he was afraid for his store, and more than anything wanted to recover his clientele once the plague had passed. It is interesting to find, a century and a half later, under the pen of the Duchess of Dino, an allusion to the virtues of the British mercantile spirit. This correspondent of the Baron of Barante, after having predicted the panic of the wealthy the month before, wrote from London in April 1832: “Here the powerful interest of commerce stifled the terror, and that power is so real that no one in London had the courage to be afraid.” [18] We must also see if faith played a role. It might have encouraged resignation; Daniel Defoe reserves an important place for it. M. de Rémusat wrote in 1832, “It is in such circumstances that the absence of the religious sentiment is most felt. In this regard, all of this more resembles an epizooty than an epidemic.” [19]
But those who refused to flee did not, for all that, renounce precautions. Like this London merchant who, in 1665, decided to not let go: “He bought 3000 pounds of biscuits...20 barrels of flour...and placed in the cellar, aside from medicinal drugs, a reasonable amount of wine, liqueurs, eau-de-vie, and also that new and costly liquor called Eau de Peste...He bought three oxen and two pigs that he had killed, salted, and placed in a barrel...” The enumeration of the provisions would take up a page. [20] We would guess that certain wealthy Parisians acted no differently in 1832. “Baron de Rothschild had his house painted in chlorine,” wrote the Count de Castellane, and Doctor Magendie said at the time to his auditors at the Collège de France, “I saw wealthy persons, and among them one who could furnish the text for quite an amusing comedy. Her entire house, up to the attic, was garnished with antidotes...She wasn’t ill, but had a mania for doctor’s visits.” [21]. It might be appropriate to ask if this is not a form of fear. The interest presented by this attitude is not only psychological; when the illness arrives, the rumor “will spread that the wealthy have monopolized all the medicines.” [22]
Upon the announcement of the epidemic, the reaction of the masses was different. The people shrugged their shoulders and guffawed. Daniel Defoe is not the only novelist to speak after gathering information at a good source. Alessandro Manzoni has his “Promessi Sposi” evolve in the middle of a Milan decimated by the plague of 1630. In the beginning there were few victims. “The very rarity of these accidents...increasingly confirmed the multitude in the stupid and deadly confidence that the plague didn’t exist” [23]. Let us now pass to London in 1832: cholera was raging across Eastern Europe and was advancing with giant steps; the Health Council increased its warnings. Nevertheless “the people...still believed that there was no epidemic.” [24] In Paris there was the same skepticism among the masses: people drank to cholera’s health. [25] In the provinces there was the same mocking indifference: Doctor Petit was astonished: “Who would believe that among the lowest class of the inhabitants of Amiens there could be found a mass of individuals who would laugh at those salutary measures and would regard cholera as an imaginary being?” [26] Why bring up these facts? Is it to note a difference in conduct upon the announcement of a possible sudden death? Especially because the people asked why the news was launched. Their explanation is not to be set aside on the pretext that it is erroneous, or else, let us speak no more of the “brigands” of 1789, those “ghosts.” [27] Before the arrival of cholera, in Amiens they claimed it was “invented by the government with the goal of deflecting people from politics.” In London in 1832 it was said that “the doctors were imposters and that cholera only existed...in their imagination as an instrument of their greed.” A singular convergence of opinions which recalls certain invectives cast before 1789 in the south of France. [28] In Milan in 1630 the doctors only announced the plague “in order to exploit public fear.” [29] When the epidemic became obvious the evidence had to be accepted. Would they have forgotten what was said the day before about the government and the doctors?
These skeptics were the first ones struck, and paid a heavy tribute to the plague. As we have seen, the proofs of this are abundant, but we must find the fact that will allow us to confirm or deny that the wealthy were considered the authors of their calamity, the one authorizing the posing of the problem, at the risk of later setting it aside.
We are not lacking in testimony concerning the Parisians who, in 1832, believed themselves to have been poisoned by the rich and who, for that reason, were ready to rise up. The prefect of police Gisquet, after having said that they attributed “the effects of the epidemic to poison,” confessed in his memoirs: “For a moment I feared for Paris’ security. I couldn’t help think that the very existence of the honest people and their property might be in danger.” [30] Was he exaggerating? Guizot was less pessimistic: “Incidents of unrest were “not numerous” and “quickly ceased.” For him the essential thing was to show the devotion of his wife, who was a “dame de charité,” or the courage of the Duc d’Orléans and Casimir Périer’s sacrifices. Nevertheless, he speaks of “popular anger,” though it was “limited to a few streets encumbered with a poor and vulgar population.” [31]Nevertheless, from her garret on Place Saint Michel George Sand saw workers pass who were full of “rage,” who believed in the fantastic measure of empoisoning. [32] This, it will be said, is just George Sand, but should we also suspect the deposition of a man of the Right, Armand de Pontmartin? He said in his memoirs: “During the past week [cholera] recruited its victims only among the poor, and the number of its victims grew in frightening proportions... [The Parisian population] accused the rich, the nobles and the bourgeois, not only of not dying, but of poisoning the poor... They went down the aristocratic streets crying for death...We had reached the point of wishing for the death of a rich man.” [33]
Armand de Pontmartin justly noted that this “fury” was not only due to “ignorance” and “hatred,” but also to “a heated and threatening revolutionary atmosphere maintained for twenty months.” As Georges Lefebvre often observed, was it not a matter of a defensive reaction provoked by fear, reinforced by a “punitive disposition which quickly becomes aggressive? [34] From this point of view the investigation might present the greatest of interest, but this research risks provisionally retaining facts that are of little importance and far from the subject. Thus, in 1588 the people of Apt, decimated by the plague, declared that the guilty one was the provost of the Chapter [35]. We will perhaps someday know who received the largest portion of the tithe or seignuerial rights, and we will perhaps then understand. The acts of dementia signaled by Daniel Defoe also seem to be minor points; a plague victim pursues a “substantial citizen’s wife,” “a gentlewoman;” she falls and he embraces her: “He told her he had the plague and why should she not have it as well.” Another example: a man knocks, enters, and he “takes leave”: “I have got the sickness and shall die tomorrow night” the intruder declares who, in that “bourgeois” house, chose the moment “when the whole family was at supper.” [36] There is doubtless matter here for establishing connections; we can judge this later.
In 1820 the cholera decimated the natives of Manila: “They accused the foreign residents of having poisoned the air and water in order to have them perish and thus take control of their country...Everyone recalls the cruel massacre of foreigners that took place at that time.” [37]
Must we conclude that everywhere and always the poor man reflects on his situation? But if he discovers-or think he has discovered-its author, he will be tempted to consider him as a criminal, a poisoner, and Armand de Pontmartin’s interpretation seems plausible: “It’s a plot to rid themselves of us, the poor will think, for they know that if we knew to count themselves we would soon have done with those capitalists and landlords, those rich wastrels who exploit us.” [38]
There remains the hatred that is directed in these circumstances against doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries, and for purposes of this research we must bring together all these merchants of health, even though the doctor considered himself superior to the surgeon [39], that expert in “barbering,” and often considered the apothecary in the same way as a shopkeeper. In times of epidemics the insufficiencies of doctors had to be supplemented. Regulations even foresaw “plague surgeons,” [40] compagnon surgeons or apothecaries who were promised the status of master without any formalities, earning their stripes on the battlefield. Finally, the apothecary was the doctor of the humble, “for we shouldn’t expect that the greatest part of the doctors of today go visit them if they’re not going to be paid.” [41] In any event, the juridical distinctions were of little importance, the poor probably not being the least concerned about this. Georges Lefebvre has pointed out this “leveling” which gives birth, in 1789, to the concept of the “lord-type,” [42] an “abstraction” fatal to both the good and the bad lord, often noble, but also the bourgeois acquirer of feudal rights. In times of epidemic an analogous syncretism merged together all those who practiced the healing arts; they became enemy agents.
And so in different countries doctors or their associates were roughly treated during the cholera of 1831-32. These acts in no way harm the prestige of the medical corps, rather they add to list of their good deeds, which is already quite long. [43] A French newspaper of the time alluded to doctors who were killed in Russian hospitals; of those from Hungary who were forced to drink chlorine. [44] In London, common folk hurled insults at doctors, stoned employees who wanted to transport the body of a deceased cholera victim, and smashed the carriage. [45] In his memoirs a Parisian doctor, Poumiès de la Siboutie, said that he saw, on the square bedfore Notre Dame, the mob seeking to enter the Hotel-Dieu hospital “in order to massacre the doctors.” He one day ran into a group on the Quai aux Fleurs: if “someone would have made known my profession,” he added, “I would have been chopped into pieces.” [46] We can have no doubts concerning this testimony. Here is a new one [47] that relates at length similar facts: M. Moysen, a young doctor, in order to avoid being thrown into the water, had to arm himself with a bistoury; “another had been cut into pieces on the Quai Voltaire,” another, “on duty at the medical post of the VI arrondissement, was forced to perform his ministry in a jacket so as not to be recognized by the crowd.” Louis Blanc specified: “In jacket and cap, like simple workers.” [48]
What were they reproached with? Sometimes with being imposters and profiteers; rather benign accusations compared to that of poisoner. Gèrardin wrote from Saint Petersburg in 1831: “Upon the appearance of this illness [the plague] the people of Revel, like those of other Russian cities, remain persuaded that they were poisoned. .. They feel an insurmountable aversion for the hospitals.” [49] And the Baron de Montbel assured that in Hungary the ignorant population regarded “the remedies as poisons.” [50] Brierre de Boismont confirms this fact à propos of the cholera in Poland [51]. Is the hospital not the doctor’s domain, and medicine his weapon? The Parisian people reasoned in the same way. A proclamation of 1832 told them: “They are poisoning you in the hospitals.” [52] Poumiès de la Siboutie affirmed that “more than once he was treated as a poisoner.” When Doctor Moysen was almost thrown into the Seine it was to the cries of “There’s the murderer, there’s the poisoner!” The intern Caffe had the valet of his classroom come to him and beg him not to poison him: “I won’t do it this time” [53] he told him in order to reassure him. And Doctor Magendie, speaking of his patients at the Hotel-Dieu wrote: “I read on their worried faces, in their taciturn air, and in their mute statements, that they suspected me of poisoning them.” [54]
And so, doctors who are poisoners in Russia, Hungary, and France; and also the wealthy, poisoners as well. Did the former accusation derive from the latter? Was it believed that doctors poisoned on behalf of the rich? In the 16th century a doctor from La Rochelle had snapped at one of his colleagues: “ You write that you tried your drug on the poor of the hospital. Who gave you the power to kill them? Are you the assistant of the executioner of your city?” [55] Deformed by the poor, would not such a fear- had they known it – have fed their rancor, if rancor there was? That “drug,” would it not have been presented as destined for the rich? We can’t affirm this, but in 1832 the reasoning appeared convincing. It was declared that doctors studied the illnesses of the poor in order to save notables. Doctor Hellis of Rouen remarked that the people distrust physicians who “come as if to observe their ills and experiment on their bodies.” [56] Baron Sers, prefect of Moselle, recounts in his memoirs that the “stupid anger of a handful of unfortunates” forced the cessation of autopsies, because they claimed that the poor were meant to “serve as examples to teach how to cure the rich.” [57] The doctor was thus an ally of the powerful. Would they go as far as crime? This was believed in 1830-32, both in- and outside of France. In Hungary remedies were considered poisons because they thought, said Baron de Montbel, that they serve to “get rid of the poor;” and Brierre de Boismont shows Hungarians peasants convinced that doctors were charged with poisoning them. And so, he wrote in his preface, cholera has only penetrated into Prussia and Austria. “We were in a hurry to make known what we had seen.” Here we already have doctors as executioners. More clearly, Armand de Pontmartin and Poumiès de la Siboutie relate, the first that the Parisian population “accuses the rich...of coming to an agreement with the doctors,” and the second, that he heard “an impromptu orator perorate a half-hour in order to demonstrate that doctors and pharmacists were the executioners chosen by the government.” Do we possess texts to refute these affirmations?
In our own era we find proof that the enemy is quickly considered a poisoner. Question those who were children in the French Lorraine of 1914. Their parents told them not to pick up the candies they might find, poisoned candies spread around by the “krauts.” Louis Blanc already spoke of “colored dragées” and “poisoned cakes” offered to little girls during the cholera of 1832. Can the historian appeal to more recent testimonies? Aerial sowers, throwing here beetles and bacteria, and there the virus of foot and mouth? Perhaps, if it is true ,as Fernand Braudel said yesterday, that “the present is history.” [58]
We speak much of “structures.” The research that we have just reported aims at certain mental structures, certain psychological constants whose knowledge, even superficial, would assist in understanding the past, for history is made, as Lucien Febvre has often recalled, with men.
1. R. Baehrel, “Économie et Terreur: histoire et sociologie, Annales historiques de la Révolution Française, April-June 1951, p 113-146
2. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague year, London 1722. On the value of the work see P. Dotton. Defoe et ses romans, Thesis in Letters, Paris, Presses Universitaires, 1924. According to this author “it is certain that Defoe called upon his personal memories and even ...presented accounts of events he lived through.” (p. 539) The “historical character of the Journal is so obvious that one can ask how it ever could been doubted: the diaries of Evelyn, and especially of Pepys... the letters of the times contained in the Harleyan manuscripts prove to what extent Defoe carefully documented his work.” (p. 601) Even if certain anecdotes had been invented they would be precious for the historian; they would show how a London merchant of 1722 saw the plague and what measures he found to be good. The previous month he had already published a small book of 282 pages ‘Appropriate preparations to be taken against the plague, bit the soul and the body.” In the same way Balzac, for example, can teach us about what a bourgeois of his time thought of the Revolution or the empire.
3. G. Lefebvre, La Grande Peur de 1789, Paris, A. Colin, 1932; Foules historiques; Les foules révolutionnaires, Centre International de synthèse, Paris, 1934
4. G. Lefebvre, Foules rèvolutionnaires, p . 104
5. According to Gosse: “An Arab held prisoner in Nauplie who visited the sick immediately recognized in the malady the variety of plague that in Alexandria is called the plague of the poor.” “Relation de la peste qui a regné en Grèce en 1827 et 1828, Paris, 1838). Chamberet notes that “during the month of July (1831) in Warsaw there were 379 indigents and 34 wealthy people suffering from cholera” (Chaberet and Trachez, De Choléra morbus de Pologne, Paris 1832, p. 54) In London the first to suffer from cholera were men living “in a state of poverty so horrible that we can’t give an idea of it... and women having but one tattered dress to protect themselves from the air and to enable them to say they weren’t nude” Halmagrand, “Relation du choléra-morbus épidémique de Londres,” Paris, 1832, p. 68) For Paris, the example of the woman “taken to the hospital four hours after the invasion of the malady... For two months she only ate bread and cheese.. She was able to accustom herself to satisfying her appetite only every 48 hours.” (P. Caffe, Considérations sur l’histoire medicale et statistique de cholèra-morbus à Paris, Paris, 1832, p. 13) Hellis, doctor in Rouen affirmed: “In our city it would be difficult to unequivocally cite any wealthy individuals touched; for my part I saw nothing above the working class.’ (Souvenirs du choléra de 1832, Paris, 1833, p. 22) Doctor Petit, of Sainte Menehould, after having made similar remarks, concluded that the epidemic “resembled a spider who isn’t happy in palaces, and who only freely spreads in stubble.” (Recherches sur le choléra-morbus épidémique, Sainte-Menehould, 1848, p.113)
6. P-M Bondois, “La misère sous Louis XIV. La disette de 1662,” Revue d’histoire économoiqe et sociale, 1924, p. 53-117.
7.Daniel Defoe, Journal...
8. Ibid
9. Ibid,
10. G. Lefebvre, Les foules... p. 93
11. Ibid p.94
12. La Grande peur, p. 3
13. Defoe, Op. cit...
14. A. Barante, Souvenirs, Paris, Calmann Levy, 1890-1901 vol 4, p. 486
15. Gosse,. Op. cit. p. 55
16. L. Blanc, Histoire de dix ans, Paris, ed. 1882, p. 498
17. E.V.E.B Castellane, Journal (1804=1862) Paris, Plon-Nourrit vol 2, p. 502
18. A. Barante, op cit vol. 4 p. 503
19. Ibid, p. 509-50
20. Revue médicale française et étrangère, Paris, 1836, vol 1, p. 155
21. F. Magendie, Leçons sur le choléra-morbus, Paris, 1832, p. 247
22. Dr. Delaunay, Le corps médical et le choléra en 1832, Tours, 1933, p.8
23. A Manzoni, I promessi sposi
24. Halmgrand, op. cit p. 72
25. A. Comte de Pontmartin, Mes Mémoires, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1885, p. 217
26. Dr. J. Petit, Histoire du choléra-morbus, Amiens, 1833, p.92
27. G. Lefebvre, La Grande peur, p. 246
28. R. Baehrel, op cit, p. 121
29. A. Manzoni, op cit
30. H. Gisquet, Mémoires, Paris, 1840, vol 1, pp. 464-465
31. F. Guizot, Mémoires pour server d’histoire de mon temps, vol 2, p 314; one page on Mmee Guizot, one page on Casimir Périer and the Duc d’Orléans’ visit to the Hotel-Dieu, more than two pages on the illness and death of Casimir Périer.
32. G. Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 1898 edition, Calmann-Lévy, vol 4, p. 111
33. A. de Pontmartin, op. cit, p. 219
34. G. Lefebvre, Foules révolutionnaires, p. 99
35. F. Sauvé, Épidémies de peste a Apt, Annales de la Société d’études provençales, vol 2, 1905, p. 39-50, 87-101
36. D. Defoe, op cit
37. Revue des Deux Mondes, vol VI, 1832, p. 382
38. A. de Pontmartin, op. cit., p. 218
39. On the reciprocal sentiments of doctors, apothecaries and surgeon-barbers, and even of surgeon-barbers and barbers-wigmakers, see FJ Hunauld, Le chirugien-medecin , Paris, 1726.
On their place in the social ladder see Closmadeuc “Chirugie et barberie en Bretagne” Bulletin de la Société polymathique de Morbihan, Vannes, 1868, p 61-1240: doctors and apothecaries “stood far taller” than surgeons; but there’s a contrary indication in P. Delaunay, Les chirugiens du Haute-Maine sous l’ancien Régime, Le Mans, 1933, p. 107: “surgeons are grouped with doctors and apothecaries in the same electoral group;” the same author notes “In the countryside the surgeons had to occupy themselves with medicine and pharmaceuticals.”
40. F. Quesnay, Recherches critiques et historiques sur l’origine...Paris, 1744, p 272: “The surgeons designated to assist plague victims and who were called health surgeons
41. E. Wickersheimer, La medicine et les medecins en France a l’époque de la Renaissance, Paris, 1905, p. 112
42. G. Lefebvre, Foules révoluionnaires, p. 95
43. Faidherbe, op. cit., only knows of one Flemish doctor “who betrayed his calling.” The Comtesses de Boigne wrote that during the cholera of 1832 “only one doctor of the numerous faculty of medicine profited from a specious excuse to remove himself. He was never able to reappear among his colleagues.” Chamberet, rendering homage to one of his colleagues victim of his duty, speaks of the “battlefield where the military health service had no deserters.”
44. Mairie de la IVe arrondissment , April 3, 1832
45. Halmagrand, op. cit p. 72
46. Poumiès de la Siboutie, Souvenirs d’un medecin de Paris, Paris, Plon 1910, p. 236
47. La vérité entière sur les empoisonnments. Cruautés exercées sur les malheureux victimes. Sanglantes excés de la fureur populaire, PAris, n.d. (18320
48. L. Blanc, op. cit, p. 500
49. A Gérardin and P. Gaimard, Du choléra-morbus en Russie.... Paris, 1832, p. 6
50. Montbel, “Lettre sur le cholera de Vienne en Autriche,” Revue des Deux Mondes, 1832
51. A. Brierre de Boismont, Relation du choléra en Pologne, Paris, 1832, p. 180
52. Gisquet, op. cit, p. 477
53. E. Rich, Paris malade, esquisses du jour. Paris, 1832-33, vol 2, p. 372
54. Cited by Delaunay, Le Corps medical, op. cit. p. 72
55. Cited by Wickersheimer, op. cit, p. 21
56. Hellis, op. cit, p. 67
57. H. Sers, Souvenirs d’un préfet de la monarchie, Paris, 1906, p. 284
58. F. Braudel “La géographie face aux sciences humaines,” Annales, Oct-Dec 1951, p. 485-492.