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SUMMARY: This article examines a series of experiments involving the deliberate infection of human subjects with syphilis that were performed in Paris in 1859 by Dr. Camille Gibert and Dr. Joseph Alexandre Auzias-Turenne. Using the scientific literature on syphilis, the contemporary reaction in the French medical press to Gibert's and Auzias-Turenne's experiments, and the private papers of Auzias-Turenne, this paper places these experiments within a context of scientific and professional rivalry, and seeks to show how both moral and scientific concerns shaped and limited experimental practices in mid-nineteenth-- century France.
KEYWORDS: Philippe Ricord, Camille Gibert, Auzias-Turenne, syphilis, nineteenth-- century France, experimentation on human subjects, medical ethics, syphilization
In the fall of 1858 Dr. Joseph Alexandre Auzias-Turenne, the self-proclaimed inventor of syphilization, addressed a letter to the minister of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, on the controversy over the symptoms of syphilis in its secondary phase. Certain physicians' continuing denial of the contagiousness of such symptoms, he argued, posed a threat to public health and complicated the administration of justice:
Although the courts have generally acknowledged [that such symptoms are contagious], on a number of occasions a conflict of opinion has unfortunately arisen between expert medical witnesses appointed by the court. All of this places the practitioner in a difficult and even disastrous state of uncertainty. This not only threatens the interests of his clients and possibly compromises their life and health, it can even go so far as to paralyze the all-important work of justice. To demand a clear and scientific solution to the issue in question would thus recognize the public interest and respond to the demands of public opinion.1
The minister, the future minister of state Eugene Rouher, promptly forwarded Auzias's letter to the Imperial Academy of Medicine and requested that he be kept informed of the Academy's response.2 The Academy immediately organized a commission to study the question and named as reporter the well-known dermatologist Dr. Camille Gibert.
When Gibert reported back to the Academy seven months later on 24 May 1859, he described a series of experiments that he had conducted together with Dr. Auzias-Turenne in response to Rouher's request. That January, Gibert told his colleagues, the two of them had inoculated four patients at the Hopital St.-Louis...