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In 1864, a cousin of Pozzi’s, Alexandre Laboulbène, had already secured a position as a physician in a Paris hospital when he encouraged Samuel to travel to the City of Lights and commence his medical studies.
59 rue des Saints-Pères | On November 2, 1864, the eighteen-year-old arrived at his rooms at 59 rue des Saints-Pères in Paris. Despite the rigid religiosity of his upbringing, Samuel-Jean Pozzy appeared to hold no theological reservations as he embarked on his medical career; however, it is interesting to speculate how the young minister’s son fared during his first few months amidst the sensual pleasures of the big city. The Paris of the Second Republic was a far cry from provincial Bergerac. George Haussman had transformed a congested mediaeval cesspool into a glittering metropolis that was the most beautiful and sophisticated city in Europe. The rebuilt Paris was a city of spectacular architecture, massive boulevards, grand public buildings, cabarets and theatres. Fashionable women of the upper echelons of society hosted sophisticated salons while young wastrels met in cafes and coffee houses to gossip about the liaison of the moment. Parisian society was scintillating and worldly but unfortunately, was also rigidly stratified along class and religious lines and not particularly inviting to anyone who was not a member of la grande bourgeoisie (i.e. upper middle-class), royalty or the Catholic Church. |
| How did this provincial from rural France, a country boy from a one-horse town fare among the elite of the Parisian medical establishment? Apparently very well for after his externship was completed, the youthful student opened himself up to cosmopolitan society and began to use the original Italian spelling of his name, Pozzi. He undoubtedly shed the soft, Italian-accented French of the Bergerac area and all vestiges of the regional attitudes of his provincial upbringing. Like every outsider, Pozzi soon learned the surest entry into Parisian society was through well-placed women. He was like the character Rastignac from the writings of Balzac, an ambitious young man from the provinces who used wit and charm to climb the social ladder. Admired for his intellect, manners and beauty, young Samuel quickly cultivated a number of contacts and entered the world of the Parisian salon, where actors, writers, painters, poets and the demi-monde inhabited a universe ruled by intellectual women of culture and powerful social connections. It appears that he did not allow his Calvinistic roots to interfere with his success in society. |
| Unfortunately, both his studies and advancement through the ranks of the cultivated society were interrupted in 1870 by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, a catastrophe that would eventually turn into unexpected boon for both medicine and his career. |
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Napoleon III declared war on Prussia while Pozzi was still an extern at the Necker Hospital and an aide in anatomy in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris. All men in France, regardless of marital status or class were called to arms. The patriotic young student immediately volunteered and was appointed a major in the medical corps of the French Army. Very quickly, however, he regretted not having joined the medical corps of a new organization, the Croix-Rouge Francaise, the Red Cross. Many of his fellow medical students joined the Red Cross and immediately departed for the war; unfortunately, young Samuel was left biding his time for several months in Paris.
| When he finally arrived at the front, Pozzi witnessed the brutality of the war first hand and it is possible that it was at the front lines that the young medic first heard of the successful work of a British doctor, Joseph Lister, on the field of battle. Lister’s ideas had remarkable results in treating the battlefield wounds of German soldiers with sterile bandages and cleansing solutions of carbolic acid. It was ironic that despite the fact that a Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, discovered the existence of bacteria and the French medical community was at the vanguard of research in the field, physicians at the front were still struggling with massive rates of infection and common contamination. |
Dr. Joseph Lister |
Unfortunately, Semmelweis was silent regarding his findings, remaining mum even when another colleague published two papers on the method. He began washing his medical instruments as well as his hands, engendering the rancor of his fellow doctors. His observations went against the current scientific opinion of the time, which blamed diseases on an imbalance of the basic "humours" in the body. The physicians argued that even if Semmelweis’ findings were correct, washing one's hands each time before treating a pregnant woman, as he advised, required too much effort. Doctors were also probably reluctant to admit that they had caused so many deaths.
Dr. Ingaz Semmelweis | The increasing hostility caused Semmelweis to return to Budapest, a medical backwater compared to Vienna. By utilizing sterile methods, he cut the death rate by puerperal fever to less than one percent. He then systematically isolated the causes of death, autopsied victims, created control group and analyzed his findings statistically. Semmelweis spent fourteen years developing his ideas and lobbying for their acceptance. This information was the essential when he finally published a treatise on his methods in 1861. Unfortunately, his book was criticized and in response, Semmelweis violently attacked his critics, thereby worsening his cause. He suffered a mental breakdown four years later, was committed to a mental institution where he cut his finger and, irony of ironies, passed away from the same infection that had killed his colleague years before. It was in 1865 that Joseph Lister began spraying a carbolic acid solution during surgery to kill germs and finally it was Lister who gave this tragic genius his due when he declared, "Without Semmelweis, my achievements would be nothing." |
German physicians utilized Dr. Lister’s methods of sterilization and the rate of death from infections began to plummet; unfortunately, the French medical establishment largely Lister’s methods and soldiers continued to die from contamination. While at the front, Pozzi was injured in an accident involving an ambulance, thereby limiting his further service during the war. He himself diagnosed a fracture of his ankle involving both malleoli, a diagnosis he was able to confirm when X-rays made their appearance some thirty-five years later.
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Professor Broca was an astonishing prodigy who had baccalaureate degrees
simultaneously in literature, mathematics and physics, a genius who entered medical school
at seventeen and completed his medical training by the age of twenty. The two men bonded
quickly for they had much in common. Like Pozzi, Broca was of Italian ancestry, a product
of rural France and most importantly, was also the son of a Protestant minister.
According to his biographers, Broca was a congenial man, a genius who led millions
as an early pioneer in the fields of pathology, neurology and anthropology. He is
most remembered for his monumental work on diseases of the brain, a subject that also held
the interest of his favored pupil. The world of Broca was one of reason, something
inflamed more traditional thinkers and possibly led to heated discussions between
Samuel and his father.
For a time, Pozzi worked as Broca’s assistant and under his tutelage developed into a gifted anatomist and an expert in the art of dissection, a skill that would assist him greatly in his career as a surgeon. So pervasive was Broca’s influence that Samuel Pozzi’s first treatises as a medical student were not in the subject that would eventually propel his medical career, gynecology, but in Broca’s specialties, anthropology and comparative anatomy. |
Paul Pierre Broca |
| In 1872, Pozzi's brilliance was rewarded with a prestigious Gold Medal. He obtained his doctorate in 1873 with the publication of his dissertation on obstetric fistulas. According to both Dr. Caroline de Costa and Alain Bugnicourt, Doctor Pozzi elucidated a surgical method for treating fistulas of the bowel and the more common obstetric fistulas, which, at the time, were the bane of women of childbearing age. Obstetric fistulas occur when the delicate tissue between the vagina and bladder is torn during protracted labor, often when a woman undergoes childbirth alone. If a woman survived, she was left incontinent and foul smelling, a pariah banned from her home or village. Many of the women who developed fistulas in the nineteenth century were poor, but fistula was also not unknown among well-off women for the common denominator was protracted labor and difficulty with delivery. Unfortunately, many physicians in France, Great Britain and the United States, believed Biblical dictums which taught that pain in childbirth was ordained by a vengeful deity; in spite of being reared in a fundamentalist home, Pozzi did not share those sentiments and always was concerned for the comfort of his patients. He addressed and treated this horrific malady that continues to plague women throughout the Third World to this day, a condition that will be discussed later as the catalyst in the beginning of modern gynecology. |
French Red Cross Medal |
The ambitious young man quickly rose through the ranks of the Parisian medical establishment. In 1875 he became Agrégé with the publication of his thesis on hysterectomy in the treatment of uterine fibroma. The title Agrégé is the highest university degree in France or Belgium. It is awarded post- doctorate and confers upon the holder the right to teach at the university level and the title of Professor.
In 1876, while attending the Congress of the British Medical Association, Pozzi had the opportunity to study with Lister, later Lord Lister, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Pozzi was an ardent convert and upon his return to Paris, published the first treatise on Lister’s method in French, Quelques observations a propos du pansement de Lister appliqué aux plaies d’amputation et d’ablation de tumeurs. He was the first French surgeon to apply Lister’s principles in the operating theater and disseminated Lister’s methods of sterilization to doctors throughout the city, encouraging them to wash their hands before operating on their patients. By 1877, Pozzi had become a hospital surgeon and his medical career continued to progress.
Unfortunately, three years later, in the summer of 1880, his friend and mentor, Dr. Broca died suddenly of an aneurysm; luckily, Broca’s untimely death did not leave the ambitious surgeon rudderless. Pozzi continued his climb to the heights of his profession, giving theoretic lectures before eager students. In 1883, he was appointed surgeon at the Parisian hospital that served as Dr. Broca’s base, the prestigious Hospital of Lourcine-Pascal, which was later renamed the Broca Hospital in honor of the great doctor. By 1884, Pozzi was firmly entrenched at the Lourcine-Pascal, and had enough influence to establish a chair in gynecology and begin the work with which he became most associated. By the age of thirty-seven, Professor Pozzi’s eminence in the world of French medicine was firmly established.
The source for these pages are from Dr. Caroline de Costa’s translations of Quelques observations a propos du pansement de Lister appliqué aux plaies d’amputation et d’ablation de tumeurs, Pozzi, S., Paris, Delahaye, 1876, Samuel Pozzi – Chirurgien et ami des femmes, Vanderpooten C., Paris, Editions In Fine, 1992, The Development of Gynecological Surgery and Instruments, Ricci, J. Philadelphia, Blakiston, 1949, A Treatise on Gynecology, Medical and Surgical. Trans. B H Wells. New York, William Wood, 1892, John Lienhard, Engines of Our Ingenuity
Thanks to Pozzi scholar and fellow Pozzi Posse member, Alain Bugnicourt, for the photograph marked "pas de calais1" which was the entrance to the hotel located at 59 rue des Saints-Pères in which Samuel spent his first year in Paris, having arrived there for the first time at the age of 18, November 2, 1864 around midnight, at the Orleans train station (today the Austerlitz Station).