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, the author 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.