Medical Modernization

Hospitals transformed from charitable death houses to scientific treatment centers. The Pasteur Institute's discoveries revolutionized medical practice. Antiseptic surgery, X-ray diagnosis, laboratory analysis—medicine became technological. Patients who once consulted neighborhood healers now trusted white-coated strangers wielding mysterious instruments.

Dr. Suzanne Noël pioneered plastic surgery, repairing faces disfigured by accidents or birth. Her clinic near the Champs-Élysées attracted wealthy women seeking youth but also working-class patients needing reconstruction after industrial accidents. "Technology wounds," she observed, "and technology heals. We doctors navigate between."

Public health improved dramatically. Sewers, clean water, garbage collection—mundane technologies that saved more lives than dramatic surgeries. Infant mortality dropped. Typhoid retreated. Tuberculosis, the Romantic disease, became shameful evidence of poverty rather than poetic sensitivity. Death rates fell so sharply that insurance companies recalculated actuarial tables.

Yet medical progress created new anxieties. Neurasthenia—nervous exhaustion blamed on modern life's pace—became epidemic among the middle class. Sanitariums proliferated, offering rest cures from progress. The alienist (psychiatrist) Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrated hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital, his Tuesday lectures becoming fashionable entertainment where society watched madness performed.