Author: Abi Grassler

In Paris, I have noticed that many of the older buildings have been repurposed to house museum collections. The Louvre, for example, was originally built in the twelfth century as a fortress and was later converted into one of the main royal palaces for the royal family and their court before becoming the art museum we know it to be. For our last excursion, we took a trip to the Musée de Santé des Armées, a museum devoted to medical military technology. This museum, like the Musée Arts et Métiers, was once a convent. The first exhibition in the museum explains the history of the building, and there is also a chapel in the center that is still actively used. In fact, while we were there an altar boy was in training.

Continue reading “Religious Experiences and Neuroscience”

One of our classes most lively excursions was to the chocolate museum, where we also got to make our own chocolate. The museum started with exhibits about the cocoa itself and its agricultural history. We then learned about its history as a culinary art, from the chemistry involved in cooking the chocolate to the artistry that is involved in the process. After visiting the museum, we made dark chocolate with hazelnut filling. As it turns out there is a bit of a learning curve to chocolate making; you have to be very precise with temperature and timing. Considering it was our first time, the chocolates we made turned out well.

At the Musee d’Histoire de la Medicine, we walked through a timeline of medicine, ranging from the ancient Egyptians through the early 1900’s. The museum had antique devices from every field of medicine. The museum’s collection contained everything from medical devices that were used on Louis XIV to a table that was inlayed with human organs that had a foot as a centerpiece. There were several antiques that came from fields related to neuroscience, such as hearing aids, eye, some of the first prosthetics, and an electrostatic machine.

Yesterday we visited le Musée de Fumeur to learn about the history of smoking. The museum began in a store that is in operation today, where we saw the various modes of intake for nicotine and cannabis which are in use in France today. As we continued through the rest of museum, the cultural phenomenon of smoking unfolded, ranging from tools found in tribal villages to smoking paraphernalia from the 1800’s in Paris. Like many of our visits, it may be unclear as to why a group of neuroscience students visited a museum about smoking, but is one of the most popular topics in neuroscience at the moment. For class, we recently reviewed a neuroscience article where researchers tested personality characteristics of rats and whether behavior could predict vulnerability to nicotine consumption.

As we start our last week in Paris, I thought it would be a good time to post a throwback about our first trip to the Musée Fragonard d’Alfort, or the veterinary museum. As you may have seen from other posts, this collection consists of anatomical models as well as animal oddities. At the end of the tour we reached the Fragonard exhibit, where we found flayed bodies of horses and men preserved by Honoré Fragonard, an anatomy professor of the school. Not only could we see each blood vessel and muscle fiber, but the nerves from the bodies had been removed and displayed separately. As neuroscientists, having the chance see just how long and delicate our nerves really are in comparison to the entire body was quite an experience, particularly in seeing the sciatic nerve, which runs all the way from the spinal cord to the feet.