TRAVELS AROUND THE WORLD
Travel Destination : Medical Museum
cc : Terry Robinson / Flickr
France .
As a physician attracted to the history of medicine , I have always looked forward to visiting medical museums , whenever I travel to a new place . At the top of my list of medical museums is the Musee Dupuytren in Paris ,
You may be familiar with Dupuytren ’ s contracture named after Baron Guillaume Dupuytren , who was the first to describe surgical treatment for that condition in 1831 . He was born in 1777 and studied medicine at the Ecole de Medicine in Paris . He became the head surgeon and later the professor of operative surgery at the Hotel-Dieu , famous for being the oldest continuously operating hospital in the world . He was recognized as a brilliant surgeon endowed with remarkable skill and dexterity . Apart from being well-known for treating Napoleon Bonaparte ’ s hemorrhoids , he is credited with many firsts in surgery such as draining a brain abscess successfully by making a burr hole in the skull . He died in 1835 , and his bequest established the Musee Dupuytren .
I should explain why I was so keen to visit the Musee Dupuytren . One of the most cherished exhibits in that museum is the collection of brains donated by Paul Broca , the French physician , anatomist
by VASUDEVA IYER , MD
and anthropologist , credited with localizing motor speech area in the brain . In 1861 , Broca saw a patient , Louis Victor Laborgne , who could not utter any word other than a single repetitive syllable “ Tan ” ( hence , his nickname was Tan ). Tan was an epileptic for many years and later developed loss of speech and over the years , right hemiparesis . Tan died within a few days after Broca saw him , and an autopsy showed a lesion in the left frontal lobe , mainly involving the inferior frontal gyrus . A second patient , Lelong , whose spoken speech was limited to just five words also showed a lesion in a similar location ( now called Broca ’ s area ). Broca preserved those brains ( without dissecting them ), and they became part of many specimens exhibited in the Musee Dupuytren . I was a budding neurologist when I visited the museum and experienced the thrill of a lifetime when I saw those historic brains with my own eyes . Broca ’ s foresight in preserving those brains in their entirety was admirable as it made it possible to study them with high resolution MR imaging recently . 1
Sadly , the Musee Dupuytren has been permanently closed since 2016 . Thankfully , there are many museums in Europe and the U . S . that serve as medical archives . Perhaps the best museums are in London , such as the Wellcome collections and the Hunterian Museum . I was uncertain which of the museums I should write about . A man I met recently made the choice easier . As we chatted , he mentioned that he taught science in a high school and loved biol-
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