The Museum of the History of Medicine is not one of Paris’s higher profile museums, tucked away deep in the Paris Descartes University on the Left Bank and only open for a few hours in the afternoon, but it is one of the most beguiling. Housed in a long, galleried, wood-panelled room built in 1905, it is home to one of the oldest medical collections in Europe. This was founded in the 18th century and includes all kinds of historic medical implements, some of them rather fearsome, such as a giant Wimshurst machine that was used to generate static electricity for electric shock treatments in the days before mains electricity. Now, as part of the PhotoSaintGermain festival, the museum is hosting , an exhibition of photographsBaudouin and is intended to be in dialogue with the museum’s permanent collection, with which it shares a space. It features images that Baudouin has sourced from institutional and private collections, largely in France, although there are also contributions from Romania, Hungary and the UK. These focus on investigations into strange phenomena carried out largely between the mid-19th and late 20th century by members of the scientific and medical establishment, but whose work is mostly ignored or dismissed by that establishment today. As a result, the exhibition contains many photographs that would not be familiar to British audiences, and indeed, many that will be unfamiliar to French audiences as well.
