Marguerite Delorme’s depiction of lung decortication, 1894
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Date
2026-06-29
Authors
Kelly, Mary
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Abstract
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.
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© 2026, the Authors. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med-ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this articlehas been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords
19th Century art history , Women’s art , Medical humanities , [History]
Citation
Kelly, M 2026, 'Marguerite Delorme’s depiction of lung decortication, 1894', Modern and Contemporary France, pp. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2026.2677061
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