Marguerite Delorme’s depiction of lung decortication, 1894

On 9 September 1893 the French physician Professor Edmond Delorme first performed pulmonary decortication surgery to treat empyema at Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. Including crude forms of early anaesthesia, this moment of discovery was captured by his daughter the painter Marguerite Delorme (1876-1946) in ‘Professor Edmond Delorme (1847-1929) Describing Lung Decortication to Trainee Doctors of the Val-de-Grâce, 1894’, 1897 (herein after ‘Val-de-Grâce, 1894’). Although medical painting was a well-established practice, works located in military hospitals were highly unusual. In 1894, Val-de-Grâce was both a military hospital and a teaching facility with an all-male medical studentship. That the painting was created by a woman artist in such a masculine space makes this depiction of historical surgery and anaesthesia practices rarer still. Adopting a gendered lens for the purpose of offering new insights into the area of medical painting, I will use ‘Val-de-Grâce, 1894’ to create a bridge between medical and art practices. Such high-art medical subject matter was generally inaccessible to women artists during the nineteenth century and, on creating the painting, Delorme interrupted male medical spaces by claiming a female space in the operating theatre of Val-de-Grâce. Pushing this gendered discussion even further, the study will explore how ‘Val-de-Grâce, 1894’ subverts the Foucauldian concept of the medical gaze.