#nyamparis

And just like that...they’re gone.

This morning, our last large shipment of boxes from the NYAM Collection of International Medical Theses left the building for the Library Service Center in Durham. Au revoir!  À la prochaine!   

Medical lithograph from 1883 showing multiple extoses, or benign cartilaginous tumors. 

Radiology Equipment, c.1939

This image shows a system of adjustable radiology equipment installed at l'Hôpital de Saint-Alban, France. 

Should’ve Put a Ring on It

Today’s highlight from the NYAM Thesis Collection deals with the the treatment of long bone fractures by a technique called cerclage. Bone fragments are bound together and immobilized with a Parham band, a metal ribbon designed to be wrapped around bones and clamped shut like a medical-grade zip-tie. 

The 1921 thesis includes radiographs of fractured bones after the surgical introduction of Parham bands, with translucent pages designed to be laid over the radiographs and make them more easily decipherable. 

Ride the Lightening

The year: 1927.

The patient: a Bay foal, descended from “the best stock of France”

The problem: myelitis, a nervous system disorder causing the rear legs to list to one side, making the foal barely able to run

The unconventional treatment: electrotherapy

Sold by his breeder for the “ridiculous” price of 3000 francs or “about one-twentieth of his value,” the subject of this veterinary thesis from our NYAM Collection was considered a lost cause due to his rare and mysterious nervous condition---that is, until his veterinarian tried a controlled application of galvanic currents to stimulate his spinal neurons. 

Now, I can find no evidence of similar treatments being tried by reputable veterinarians today, and I’m not qualified to speak to the efficacy of galvanotherapy. However, the author of the thesis gives the following account of his quadrupedal patient’s extraordinary progress two years after treatment:

“In 1929, he became the property of a trainer, who, thanks to his good care, led him to run in Saint-Cloud and Tremblay, several times in Saint-Cloud. He makes in these races a very satisfactory impression.”

The veterinarian acknowledges that myelitis in foals has been documented to heal on its own over time; however, he attributes the cure in this case to electrotherapy, and is not shy about taking the credit. He writes:

“Had this foal not become an equine experiment under my direction, he would surely have been shot on the spot.” 

So early 20th-century veterinary medicine gave this racehorse a second chance and a happy ending. 

Lions and Crocodiles and Robots—Oh My!

These images from a 1967 thesis on child psychotherapy are copies of actual drawings made by therapy clients—all boys aged 10-13—illustrating their dreams and nightmares.

The idea is that children can express complex feelings more easily in drawings than in language; the author of the thesis, Dr. Marie-Thérése Baron, reports that her young artists were “totally blocked in terms of verbal contact” but eager to draw out their nocturnal reveries when presented with paper. Inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud and Sophie Morgenstern, Baron analyzes these “graphic representation[s] of the infantile unconscious” for expressions of trauma, loss, and conflict.  

The result is a fascinating mélange of psychoanalytic jargon and art criticism.  

For example, the drawing “Lion in a Cage” is interpreted as a classic Oedipal conflict à la Freud: the carefully-drawn lion (“giving an impression of strength and suppleness”) represents the father, against whose influence the child, in guise of whip-wielding lion-tamer, struggles to assert his own gender identity. The bars on the cage are drawn with long, heavy strokes extended to a vanishing point, revealing “intense anguish” and despair of escape.  

Similarly, “The Crocodile” shows the dreamer brandishing a rifle against a toothy reptilian (a manifestation of castration anxiety, Baron claims). In “The Sickness” [La maladie], the dreamer appears immobilized on a gurney surrounded by desperate, dramatic cross-hatching.

The complex drawing “Belphégor” references a 1965 French miniseries, Belphégor le fantôme du Louvre; it seems that this child saw the frightening titular character on television and later had nightmares about him. The dream-drawing shows a demonic figure threatening to devour a child in a pot (la marmitte) with a fork and knife (fourchette, couteau); outside the dream-bubble, the same figure seems to threaten the viewer with a dagger (un poignard) and fistful of fire (du feu). The psychoanalyst’s description ends with the absolute strangest sentence I have ever read in a medical thesis: “Finally, closing the infernal imaginary circle, a robot lights a wick of dynamite.”

If you want to know the Freudian interpretation of the robot, you’ll have to check out the thesis yourself in our collection (or use your imagination). 

A foal in utero, from a veterinary thesis in our NYAM Collection. This illustration shows an unusual positioning of the foal’s forelegs likely to result in dystocia, or difficult labor.  

The Art of Women Institutionalized for Psychosis in the 1960s 

For his 1968 medical thesis (part of our NYAM Thesis Collection), Hughes Scharbach received permission to set up an art studio on the ground floor of the psychiatric hospital where he was interning and keep it stocked with paints and materials for six months, for the use of patients during regular supervised sessions. This experiment in art therapy was fairly free-form; in the methodology section of his introduction, Scharbach writes:

Spontaneous creation was de rigueur, no model being proscribed, no theme being given, an invitation to represent any matter being extended at the beginning of each session. 

One woman with a diagnosis of paranoid psychosis, who had trained at an academy of fine arts before her institutionalization, was singled out as a most enthusiastic and regular visitor to the atelier, along with a group of three schizophrenic friends. Scharbach strangely mentions that other patients with diagnoses of mania and unspecified neuroses were included in the study, but “their production was poor, and too limited.”

The results are beautiful, although it is a tragedy (if not a crime) that they were not reproduced in full original color.   

The two striking pieces featured in this post, L’Oiseau de feu [Firebird or Phoenix] and Les Masques [The Masks] respectively, are attributed to the same anonymous schizophrenic artist.