Queer Places:
Bergerac Protestant Cemetery
Bergerac, Departement de la Dordogne, Aquitaine, France
Samuel-Jean
Pozzi (3 October 1846 – 13 June 1918) was a French surgeon and gynecologist.
He was also interested in anthropology and neurology. When a youthful
John Singer Sargent was first launching his career, some of his closest
associates were very flamboyant. Most conspicuous among them was
Robert
de Montesquiou - "the so-called "Prince of Decadence"" - whose incarnation
of dandified aestheticism was to Paris what
Oscar Wilde's was to London. Another
was Samuel Jean de Pozzi,
whose sexual exploits were almost as legendary as his pioneering work in the
field of gynecology; both aspects of his character were dashingly suggested in
Sargent's full-lenght portrait of 1881, Dr. Pozzi at Home. In the summer of
1885, Sargent have these friends (and the composer
Prince
Edmond de Polignac) a collective letter of introduction to
Henry James, who dutifully arranged a dinner
for them to meet James
Abbott McNeill Whistler for a chance to see the artist's fabled "Peacock
Room" in the home of Frederick
Richards Leyland, a shipping magnate whose house was at 49 Prince's Gate.
According to James, "on the whole nothing that relates to Whistler is queerer
than anything else." That all three Frenchmen would later resurface in the
masterwork A la recherche du temps perdu) of another gay writer,
Marcel Proust, makes the anterior
coincidence queerer still.
Samuel-Jean Pozzy (he changed the spelling later) was born
in Bergerac, Dordogne to a family of Italian/Swiss descent. Samuel's father
Benjamin Dominique Pozzy (1820–1905), a minister of the Reformed Church of
France, married Marthe-Marie Inés Escot-Meslon (1821–1857) in 1844 in
Bergerac, Dordogne, France. She died when Samuel was ten, and his father then
married an Englishwoman, Mary Anne Kempe, in 1859 in Bakewell, Derbyshire.
Pozzi went to study first to Pau and then to Bordeaux. For his handsome
appearance and cultured demeanor, other pupils nicknamed him The Siren.
Dr Pozzi at Home, by John Singer Sargent
In 1864, Pozzi began to his study medicine in Paris. When
the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, he volunteered and became a medic.
Later he was one of the pupils of the neurologist Paul Broca and as his
assistant he worked with anthropology, neurology and comparative anatomy.
Pozzi graduated as a doctor in 1873. The subject of his first thesis
was fistula of the ischio-rectal fossa. In 1875, Pozzi became a university
teacher after his second thesis concerning the use of hysterotomy for uterine
fibroids. In 1876, Pozzi traveled to Scotland to the Congress of the British
Medical Association to meet Joseph Lister, whose interest in antiseptics he
supported. In 1877, Pozzi became chirurgien des hôpitaux. Pozzi went to
Austria, Germany and Britain to study gynecological methods and became one of
the pioneers of gynecology in France. He gained a reputation as a teacher,
preferring to make his rounds dressed in white overalls and wearing a black
cap. In 1881, Pozzi became a hospital surgeon, specializing in gynecological
and abdominal surgery. In 1883, he was appointed surgeon at the Hôpital de
Lourcine-Pascal. After 1884 he gave theoretical lectures in the hospital. In
1888, he became a president of the Society of Anthropology – he had been a
member since 1870. He traveled widely to supplement his knowledge. Pozzi
established the first Chair of Gynecology in Paris in 1884. In 1889, he
performed the first gastroenterostomy in France. In 1896, he was elected to
the French Academy of Medicine. In 1897, he was a co-founder of the Revue de
gynécologie et de chirurgie abdominale. In 1913, Pozzi and Georges
Clemenceau organized the first transplant symposium in Paris. In 1914, he
rejoined the army when the First World War broke out and became a military
surgeon.
In 1879, Pozzi married Therese Loth-Cazalis, heiress of a railroad magnate,
and had three children: Catherine, Jean, and Jacques. His wife wanted her
mother to live with them, which made for tensions in the marriage. Pozzi also
had affairs: with the opera singer Georgette
Leblanc, the actress Rejane, the widow of Georges Bizet, Sarah
Bernhardt, and Emma Sedelmeyer Fischhof. The daughter of an art dealer and
wife of a horse breeder, Fischhof was a beautiful, cultured woman of Jewish
heritage who became Pozzi's mistress in 1890. His wife refused to grant him
a divorce, but Fischhof remained his companion for the rest of his life.[1]
In his early days in Paris, Pozzi had met Sarah Bernhardt through a
childhood friend, the actor Jean Mounet-Sully. According to Gustave
Schlumberger, they briefly became lovers, then remained lifelong friends
afterwards. In 1898, he commissioned painter Georges Clairin—a longtime
friend—to paint a painting for the wall of his Hospital, Lourcine. Sketches by
Clairin from when he painted murals on the walls of Pozzi's house are included
in the illustrations in The Diva and Dr God. In 1898, Bernhardt insisted on
Pozzi operating on her ovarian cyst. In 1915, she called on him again, and
Pozzi arranged for a colleague to amputate her damaged leg.
Pozzi became an honorary member of the Cercle de l'Union artistique (known
as the Mirlitons) in 1881, and met the painter John Singer Sargent.[2] Sargent's
1881 portrait of Pozzi depicts him in a red dressing gown and is currently
displayed at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Pozzi befriended Marcel Proust, Robert
Proust, Reynaldo Hahn, and Robert
de Montesquiou. In 1877 he came to know poet Louise Ackermann, when he
asked her to teach him German. Salonniere Lydie Aubernon nicknamed him "the
love doctor". He corresponded with a feminist writer Augustine Bulteau. He
also collected coins and statuettes. In 1898 Pozzi was elected senator from
Bergerac and represented his district for three years. He improved the water
supply and sewer drainage of his town and was later involved with the
restructuring of the French baccalaureate exams. He did not seek re-election
in 1902. Pozzi witnessed the second trial of Alfred Dreyfus, and
supported Émile Zola who believed that Dreyfus was innocent. In 1908 the ashes
of Zola were transferred to the Pantheon and both Pozzi and Dreyfus were
present. When the journalist Gregori shot at Dreyfus and wounded him on the
arm, Pozzi rushed to his aid.
On 13 June 1918 Maurice Machu, former patient from two years before,
approached Pozzi in his consulting room. Pozzi had operated on him
for varicocele of the scrotum, and he believed he had become impotent as a
result. Machu asked him to operate again. When Pozzi refused because he could
not remedy the situation, Machu shot him four times in the stomach. Pozzi
ordered himself to be taken to the Astoria Hospital, which had been converted
into a military hospital for wounded from WW I, but the
emergency laparotomy was unsuccessful. He asked to be buried in his military
uniform and died shortly afterwards. Machu committed suicide later. Pozzi was
buried in the Protestant cemetery in Bergerac. He was survived by his diplomat
son Jean Pozzi and poet daughter Catherine Pozzi.
Pozzi wrote over 400 papers on surgery. His gynaecology text of 1890 was
translated into five languages, and with revisions remained an authority to
the 1930s.[3]
In 1874, Pozzi and Réné Benoit published a translation of Charles Darwin's The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. He wrote the first French texts
about antiseptic methods, after his visit to Lister.
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