Professor Hippolyte Bernheim

“Father of psychosomatic medicine”

 

Of Alsatian origin, as the consonance of its name lets it guess, it was born in Mulhouse in 1837.

When at the end of its secondary studies the hour of the choice sounds for him,

it is directed towards medicine and begins its course with the faculty of Strasbourg.

Named with the contests of the boarding school, he is the pupil of prestigious Masters: Sedillot, Koeberle, inter alia;

in the same way,

it approaches Villemin, then repeater at the school of the Military Health service.

Then, it will spend two years to Paris, at Trousseau and Cornil.

It presents at aggregation medicine, is received and will profit, during six months of the teaching of Virchow in Berlin.

 

(Collection D.Regional Conservatory Morque/of the Image)

It is during its time of aggregate trainee in Strasbourg that the war of 1870 bursts.

Because of the fastening of Alsace in victorious Germany, the French Government makes the decision to fold up

the Faculty of Medicine from Strasbourg in Nancy where exists at the time only one secondary school.

From this moment there, all the university career of Hippolyte Bernheim will proceed in Nancy.

Incorporated, it functions as assistant doctor of its Hirtz Master until 1878, year when it succeeds to him

the head of the pulpit of medical Private clinic A.

It will remain in station until its retirement in 1910.

Having behind him interesting experience of the field of exercise of medicine,

it delays to him to begin personal and original research.

Thus in 1883, it is directed towards reflexions of scientific nature in connection with hypnosis and hysteria,

very with the mode at the time.

What probably determines it to exploit this way is due to the fact that the previous year,

therefore in 1882 it “discovers” Liébeault which had the immense one and undeniable merit to be interested the first,

in a way new and judicious, with the problem very discussed, and very especially exploited,

of magnetism and hypnotism, and it sometimes happened to make use of it with a therapeutic aim,

great innovation of which it is necessary for him to be indebted without any restriction.

What thus makes Hippolyte Bernheim?

It understands that Liébeault touches with a certain truth, badly assimilated by the medical profession as a whole.

It then contacts its fellow-member and fellow-citizen,

and undertakes to leave its work the lapse of memory and the indifference.

It shows thanks to its clinical observations, that Liébeault is neither a dreamer,

nor one hallucinated, and that on the contrary it has the appearance of a pionner,

having been among the first to be seen a little clearly in this very disconcerting question of magnetism and hypnotism where,

since centuries, the scientists had seen only darkness.

On these new bases, Bernheim tries to release therapeutic suggestive charlatanesque maquis of hypnotism

such as it was exploited hitherto, and starts to gather the evidence of a scientific base of incipient psychotherapy.

It was far from suspecting that from this moment, it built the foundations of the School of Nancy,

which was going to triumph in a famous battle the opponent at the Parisian neurological School over Salpétrière.

At the end of a teaching hospital life, rich in events and interest, ensured to have founded a prestigious School

which will mark its place in the History of medicine,

Hippolyte Bernheim reaches the age limit which gives him the right to take a well deserved retirement: this occurs in 1910.

It is withdrawn in Paris where it will finish its life in 1919 peacefully.

“Extracted the book:“Doctors famous for Jean Schmitt (Editions of the East) “