[Mural paintings of Jean Coquet at the Desgenette Hospital in Lyon]. / Les peintures murales de Jean Coquet de l'hôpital Desgenettes a Lyon.

René Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes (1762-1837) became famous through two historical events: the first and most famous one is where he proved his courage by inoculating himself with the plague during the Syrian campaign in 1799; the second one, rarely represented in paintings, happened during the Russian retreat in 1812 when he was freed thanks to his reputation. Two wide fresco paintings facing each other in the hall of Desgenettes, a hospital built during World War Two, are witnesses of these two major events. Jean Coquet (1907-1990), a decorator, painter and glassblower, who worked at the Beaux-Arts School of Lyon, first as a decoration teacher than as its director, painted these two works of art. In 1946, he inserted them into an ornamental group constituted of ironworks, furniture, stained glass and ceramics. Two paintings from Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835) inspired these works: Bonaparte visiting the plague-stricken of Jaffa (1804) and Napoleon on the battlefield of Eylau (1808). With their academic composition and daring stylization those two frescoes represent in a modern and original way Desgenettes' life style, an archetype of what the military doctor is.

[The disfigured men represented by the great painters (O. Dix - G. Grosz - R. Freida.) Disfiguration in the history of art]. / Les gueules cassés représentées a par de grands peintres (O. Dix - G. Grosz - R. Freida) la défiguration en histoire de l'art .

Sophie Delaporte's book, Philippe Paillard's, Chantal Roussels's novels and Dupeyron's movie underline the difficulties of repairing physical and moral sufferings of the "disfigured men" wounded during the Great War. Beside medical and technical didactic aimed drawings the exhibition of wasted, mutilated or out of repair faces remains little known. In France, Germany or Great Britain there are many artists who took part in war. Among the artists the French painter Raphael Freida and some German expressionists like Otto Dix, Max Beckmann or George Grosz are the most famous. Their works are often confidential, set apart in the museums and showed in rare exhibitions in Great Britain and the United States of America. The sight of ruined faces inspired such horror that the artists depicted it only exceptionally and with discretion, before 1914. Without doubt it is the fear of touching the privacy of the face which is a part of the human identity. There are no "disfigured men" in the countless religious paintings of torture, neither in the Disasters of Warfrom painters or engravers like Goya or Jacques Callot.

[Progress in surgery of limb's wounds during the Great War]. / L'evolution de la chirurgie des plaies de guerre des membres en 1914-1918.

The prominent tenets of limb's wound surgery have been improved during the Great War. Before 1914, traditional treatment of war injuries was usually applied on the ground because injuries caused by firearms were supposedly trivial while the threatening infection refrained surgeons from acting. From the very start of 1914, gangrene and septicaemia were the terrible consequences of new types of injuries provoked by shrapnel, all the more dangerous that the wounded men were numerous and the injuries were nursed after a too important delay. New surgical facilities have been organised by the French Military Health Service which created the "Ambulances Chirurgicales Automobiles", improved the selection procedures and the mobilization of many surgeons. New surgical treatments such as lancing, continuous use irrigation, delayed suture of wounds allowed improvement of results and saved more than one soldier. Finally, the excision of dead and contaminated tissues is still nowadays the most important progress in war surgery.

[Victor Moreau and his son practised the first joint résections]. / Les docteurs Moreau de Bar-le-Duc Victor Moreau (1746-1799) Pierre-Félix Moreau (1778-1846) Les premières résections ostéo-articulaires.

Victor Moreau (1746-1799) and his son (1778-1846) were surgeons in Bar-le-Duc (French Department of Meuse). Victor Moreau invented the first joint resection technique in 1782 and submitted written comments to the "Académie Royale de Chirurgie" in 1782 then 1786 and 1789. At that time amputation was the only way of saving wounded and injured patients' lives and a conservative technique was an actual revolution in bone and joint surgery. His friend Pierre-François Percy was transmitted the technique in 1792. His son improved the technique and attempted to put it into widespread use through his thesis (1803) and the most famous essay of his in 1816. However the technique did not immediately succeed till Leopold Ollier's works proved the "bone regeneration by the periosteum" and the role of the "sub-capsular periosteum resection". Nowadays in spite of prosthesis progress some joint résections can be still indicated. At last Victor Moreau can be deemed the pioneer of the functional limb surgery.