The Musée du Service de Santé des Armées: a little-known site on the history of military medicine

In 1624, France's Queen Anne of Austria commissioned the creation of a Benedictine abbey, followed by thechurch of Val-de-Grâce, after the birth of her son. Completed in 1666, the buildings are organized around a single large cloister with two superimposed arcaded galleries. It features a central French garden, Italian and French earthenware, superb stone staircases and a collection of objects dating back to ancient Egypt.

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During the French Revolution, the abbey became a military hospital, then an army training hospital. Today, the former abbey buildings house the Service de Santé des Armées museum, the service's central library and the Val-de-Grâce school. Enriched by the collection bequeathed by the Debat doctors, the museum is a tool for passing on knowledge about the evolution of military medicine and the conditions under which soldiers are cared for in combat.

Visitors to the exhibition will have access to a panorama of military medicine:

• Army Medical Corps personnel, missions, training, uniforms
• the medical evacuation chain, from picking up the wounded on the battlefield to transferring them to hospitals in the rear
• advances in war surgery research
• wax casts of the "gueules cassées" of the 1st World War
• underwater and aerospace medicine: hyperbaric chamber and a Véronique rocket head
• the participation of military pharmacists in the great round-the-world expeditions of the 19th century, and their work on toxic war gases
• the role played by the health service in the civilian world, through humanitarian actions, the care of populations, the creation of medical schools and Pasteur institutes, the fight against major endemics and infectious diseases, and progress in the field of hygiene

Notre-Dame du Val-de-Grâce church, a royal edifice near the hospital in the Latin Quarter
Did you know that the Val-de-Grâce church was built at the request of Queen Anne of Austria, in gratitude for the birth of her son, Louis XIV? A majestic building in the 5th arrondissement, the church can be visited at the same time as the Musée du Service de Santé des Armées. [Read more]