The Musée d'Histoire de la Médecine is tucked into a corridor of the former Faculty of Medicine on the rue de l'École de Médecine, a few minutes from the Place Saint-Michel. It has been accumulating objects since 1796. The result is a cabinet of curiosities in the original sense, a room full of objects chosen because they are strange, instructive, or both.
Anatomical wax models, eighteenth-century surgical instruments, a set of Louis XIV's surgeon's tools, an amputation saw, a collection of obstetric models, the museum traces the history of medicine from antiquity to the twentieth century through the objects that medicine produced and required. It is not a comfortable visit for everyone. For those who engage with it, it is one of the most intellectually stimulating hours in Paris.
What you will see
The instruments and models. Surgical instruments spanning four centuries, from the barber-surgeon's tools of the sixteenth century to the precision instruments of the early twentieth, alongside the wax and papier-mâché anatomical models used to teach the body before cadavers were widely available, objects of scientific and strange aesthetic interest at once.
The set pieces. Among them the instruments associated with the operation on Louis XIV that, it has been argued, changed the course of French history, and a collection tracing the development of obstetric medicine from the seventeenth century, a field as socially fraught as it was technically difficult.
The surgical instruments · the anatomical models · a cabinet of curiosities
Pépin's advice
This is not for the squeamish. The museum is direct about what medicine involved before anaesthesia and antisepsis. If you or your group are sensitive to medical imagery, this is not the right choice.
It pairs naturally with the Quartier Latin. The museum is in the heart of the Latin Quarter, surrounded by the streets associated with medicine and the university for eight hundred years. A walk through the neighbourhood before or after gives the collection its geographical context.
