Mémoire sur les bouts de seins, ou mamelons artificiels et les biberons

First edition.

Marbled paper wrappers, marbled edges. Wrappers slightly creased, a few ink spots, a dampstain to the upper part of the title page that fades progressively on the following pages.

This communication was presented to the Académie de médecine of Paris, where Louis-Charles Deneux was a member of the surgical section, at the sessions of 12 and 19 February 1833. Deneux was the nephew and pupil of the celebrated Baudelocque, under whom he studied surgery and obstetrics from 1782 to 1789.

In 1816, he became physician-accoucheur to the Duchesse de Berry - a post of the highest responsibility, as the perpetuation of the Bourbon dynasty rested upon the ducal couple. After the assassination of the Duc de Berry in February 1820, the Duchesse, attended by Louis-Charles Deneux, gave birth seven and a half months later to the “miracle child”, Henri d'Artois, Duc de Bordeaux and future Comte de Chambord.

Deneux's memoir is remarkable for its precocity: as early as 1833, he was already raising the question of hygiene that would help transform medicine in the nineteenth century. His instructions on the cleanliness of feeding-bottle spouts and outlet tubes rank among the earliest reflections on the high mortality of artificially fed infants. His work thus contributes to the shift toward preventive and sanitary medicine, a movement that would find its continuation in Louis Pasteur's discoveries in the 1860s.

OCLC records only two copies on the other side of the Atlantic (Harvard, Williams College).

A very rare memoir on feeding bottles, by the celebrated physician Louis-Charles Deneux, accoucheur to the Duchesse de Berry and a major figure in the fight against infant mortality.