The ArchiMed team returns from Nancy, where we participated in the 2025 Congress of the French Society for the History of Science and Technology
The panel titled Giving Voice to Illness? A History of Illness in the First Person, organized by Claire Crignon and Yann Craus, provided an opportunity to reflect on the role given to patients' voices in psychiatric archives. Jessica Schüpbach presented a talk on the role of illness in patients' letters preserved in the medical files of the psychiatric hospital in Marsens (Fribourg) at the end of the 19th century. Alexandre Wenger offered a reflection on the issues and challenges related to the combined consideration of paper archives and human samples in reconstructing the voices of neurosyphilitic patients from Belle-Idée, the focus of the ArchiMed project. This comparative perspective feeds into the research questions of ArchiMed's historical component, particularly the methodological difficulties in reconstructing the life paths of patients whose brains are stored in Geneva's biobank. The prominent presence of patient letter collections in the Fribourg files provides a striking contrast to their absence and the nearly blank pages of the curricula vitae found in the Geneva archives. These silences and contrasts lead us to question archival gaps and explore ways to address them.
Présentation de Jessica Schüpbach
As part of the panel, the theme of self-narration by patients was explored in several forms: the exponential use of the concept of “first-person account” in psychiatric clinical research and clinical interest in the therapeutic power of such narratives, with reference to psychoanalysis (Yann Craus, Camille Jaccard); the equally widespread use of the concept of “experiential knowledge” in approaches from the humanities and social sciences (Aude Bandini); the production of ordinary introspective narratives or self-narratives to document the history of epidemics (Claire Crignon) and the history of psychology (Camille Jaccard); and the recent emergence of the notion of “biocitizens” and a renewed emphasis on individual agency in biogenomics and biogenetics (Jessica Lombard). At the same time, the creation of family investigations and narratives by relatives of patients—positioned between art and science—also reflects this interest (Jennifer Bélanger and Florence Caeyemex).
Présentation de Alexandre Wenger
Another intersection with our ArchiMed perspective—which is attentive to the need to define a biographical timeframe (which portion of a life course to consider, how to "biographize" anatomical pieces), as well as the specific temporality of (neuro)syphilis—is that research into the history of diseases and epidemics addresses the question of their duration. Some patients who tell their stories note that narration allows for closure and then historicization, while certain clinicians seek retrospective accounts from adults who grew up with autism to shed light on the condition. One might add that this current long-term perspective mirrors how Swiss psychiatrists in the 20th century viewed patients—as body-subjects, observed and studied in motion, alive, then dead and autopsied—a gaze that enabled the collection of historical anatomical specimens whose potential ArchiMed is now exploring and revitalizing.
15 Apr 2025
