Dupuytren Museum

Dupuytren museum exists since 1835 and deals with an unusual subject: the anatomical pathologies. Skeletons, wax castings and other organs and preserved in jars are shown for their malformations and where for a long time known as "monstrosities".

Founded in 1835 thanks to the bequest of William Dupuytren (1777-1835), professor of medicine at the Medical School of Paris, the museum was originally housed in the refectory of the Franciscan monastery and remained there a century. In 1935, due to the dilapidated state of the building, he was evacuated to the basement of the faculty, where he remained, but not without suffering major damage, until 1967, when it was relocated to its present location.

Currently the museum contains about 6,000 items: wax, bone pieces and parts preserved in jars and photos, paintings, prints and drawings, and some instruments for the practice of pathology. Older waxes date from the late eighteenth century and are the remains of the collections of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Some items have a unique historical value like the patient's brain that allowed Paul Broca (1824-1880) to describe the lesions of aphasia and to develop the doctrine of cerebral localization.

Finally, the museum contains the Dejerine collection established by the bequest of Jules Dejerine (1849-1917), professor of neurology at the Medical School of Paris, it contains his library, microscopes and instruments, as well as histological preparations and clinical and neuropathological photographs from which he developed his "symptomatology of the nervous system".