Doctoresse Constance Pascal (1877-1937) pioneer of French psychiatry, of Romanian origin, practiced at the asylum of the White House (and where she lived in the beautiful pavilion on the right at the entrance of the asylum) from 1927 to 1937, date of her death (she is buried in the cemetery of Neuilly-sur-Marne). Her biography, written by Felicia Gordon (an English specialist in French feminism), was finally translated and published on 25 May 2023 by Editions des femmes Antoinette Fouque. She humanized the life of the insane, removing punishment, restraints, organized the training of nurses, connected with the condition of abnormal children, advocating the work of the sick as a factor of stabilization and prevention , hospitalization being a failure...she thinks of outpatient consultations... She did relentless research to improve care. Wrote many articles, wrote 3 books, worked on a 4th in 1937 when death arrived.
Researcher, tireless worker, stubborn in her fights against the administrative "narrow", visionary, she had realized a scenario on the model of a filmed comedy that she wanted to entrust to Jean Painlevé.
Politically engaged and feminist in her actions... She did not hesitate during the Great War to go to the front to treat the wounded. In 1936, she helped German resistance fighters to join the International Brigades...
She opened one of the first blood transfusion centers in the White House in 1932 and one of the first IMP for "abnormal" children in Châlons-sur-Marne. She did outdoor psychoanalytic cures, using psychedelics... She read Freud in her language and many philosophers and psychologists, she loved literature, music, made a very beautiful study of Schumann.
On a personal level, she experienced a drama also source of her greatest happiness... she had a daughter from an adulterous relationship with General Justin Mengin. Jeanne, a hidden girl born in 1916, whom she adopted in 1924... this made it possible to preserve her daughter from the opprobrium and she continued her career as a doctor of asylums of the Seine, which was not an easy matter at the beginning of the XX century, The career of doctor of asylums being until then reserved for men...
Do we not say that reality often exceeds fiction...
Forgotten Constance Pascal returns to us on the place where she lived with her daughter, the sick workers and her 4 dogs.
Constance Pascal was an intern at the Ville-Évrard asylum from 1905 to 1909, at La Maison de Santé de Ville-Évrard in the service of Dr Paul Sérieux, and met Madeleine Pelletier, who was an intern there at the same time as she was and allowed access to the boarding school for women.
Constance took care of the women’s lodges at the nursing home.
There were 3 classes, depending on the level of comfort of the place, sort of suite for the largest, and the rates were based on the comfort offered, unlike the public asylum which was not paying for it.
The asylum was separated into two separate and autonomous entities.
Constance wrote her medical thesis in 1905, Atypical forms of general paralysis (hemiplegic and aphasic) or regional predominance of lesions in diffuse meningoencephalitis under the diection of Paul Sérieux.
We will walk to the old nursing home where she took care of the sick women ( pavillons Alsace, Picardy, Daniel Féry, Béarn, Morvan, the cell pavilion of agitated women having been demolished.
We will meet at 10am at the entrance of Ville-Évrard for this circuit Constance Pascal, (which will continue in the afternoon, in front of Maison Blanchen the pink house called the project from 14h to 18h).( see other sheet).