The "Father" of Neuro-Pathology in France, Professor-Agregé in Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Paris (South), Vice-President of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Neuro-Pathologists....

A French ‘Indianist’ Doctor

A Tribute to a Die-hard Humanist
 
by T. Wignesan, Chercheur au C.N.R.S.
Professor Jean LAPRESLE, the last of the great French Neurologists and/or Neuro-Pathologists                 
            [Feb. 3, 1921 – Dec. 2, 2000]

An Indianist  (‘Indophile’ is too meek a word for him) in his own right, he visited the Southern States, especially Tamil Nadu and Kerala, twice a year, for decades and came to love the people and place to such an extent that there was little worth knowing about the place and its history or culture that he couldn’t hold forth upon. He read the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, Naipaul and Rushdie, and constantly plied every Indian he happened to come across - clients and callers alike - at every opportunity, with pressing questions about the country right up to his last days. His Indian interlocutors never failed to be filled with admiration for his vast and consuming knowledge of the area. His thirst for Indiana was insatiable. He asked for advice like some novice on what books to read and even gently sometimes tried to defend some book or some author he had read with great care and absorption. He would go to great extents just to find out the right name of a tree he remembered out there – through precise descriptions - in the sub-continent. And yet he was an apt and informed critic of much that passed over the heads of the indigenes. 
Professor Marie-Germaine Bousser whose eloquent and touching eulogy of her mentor (on May 4, 2001 at the Société Médicale des Hôpitaux de Paris) featured in this volume (Asianists’ ASIA) talks of his intimate knowledge and appreciation of Asian art and culture. Here’s an excerpt:
“ In love with Asia as a whole, India was nevertheless his country of choice. "Eternal India, Mother of all Wisdom" is how he referred to the sub-continent in his farewell oration as President of the Society for Neurology in 1985. He has been to India some fifteen times: athwart Jaisalmer and Konarak, down Kashmir to Kerala, with a preference however for Southern India where the exuberance he encountered enchanted him." . 
Page One of Professor Marie-Germaine's "eulogy"
Page Two of Professor Bousser's "Eulogy"
 
To corroborate this particular fascination for Dravidians and to testify to his enormous 'neurological and extraneurological' knowledge, she cites an apposite anecdote: "One of his friends, Professor Wadia from Bombay, told me recently: 'I really liked having Jean Lapresle pay us a visit, for I always learnt something more about my own country.'"
       His one wish to serve as a consultant after retirement – without remuneration, of course – in Tamil Nadu never came to pass (due to my not willing to subject him to the dire un-hygienic conditions prevailing out there). He couldn’t help voicing his secret recurrent wish:
      
 “There’s nothing more restful than to slump into an easy chair along a Kerala beach and listen to the wind rustling the palm fronds,  the distant chatter of fisher-folk mixed with the sound of swooping gulls and tumbling waves - all gently wafting up the hotel verandah.”

A fleeting cataclysmic gasp would slip through imperceptibly parted lips. Then without heaving a longing sigh, his eyes would let escape in that instant – in that infinitely suffering lapse of a moment – a pipe-dream of an experience that might have come true in a distant though then fast-drifting-apart past.
       A towering lifelong bachelor of distinguished bearing and manners and whose perhaps “only” non-professional diversion, one might rightly divine, was Indian !
 
Professor Jean Lapresle
 
 
The Solitary Oak on Mount Kremlin-Bicêtre
                                                        T. Wignesan
 
On Bicêtre Mount a stately oak did spread its unmeshed 
     boughs to swarms of sparrows beating retreat             
To turtle-doves and flapping pigeon-mates a frolicsome
     haven
Where now on thunder-split crutches hop the mocking  
     magpie
Its black upturned tail uppity down high-domed arches’
     smooth-shorn limbs
Desolate within chilled-threaded casements of fading
     green
Sleek crows guard the sentinel post where gentle souls
      tread lonesome
 
Once his benign fiery eye caught the tame light in lame
    downcast distress
Novice and apprentis sorciers sought the shelter of his 
    eagle umbrella wing
The charge-nurse at his beck and call
Under the official seal of his high personal Chair
 
Now the lordly craftsman called to lay down his tools in
     honorary quack contempt
By some aging loyal birds......................too meek to fly away
......to the welcoming soothing Kerala waters
lovingly lashing under swaying “sussurait”-ing palms

Too lame to avoid the headlong charge down teetering fate
Had him appear in white blouson for the nonce’s sake
 
No nurse to jump at the phone’s end 
No student his ears peeled to every remark and question
No professorial stamp at his command
 
“You know he takes no new patients…”
The voice trailing.................................. hoarse and dead
 
 
Carting rough brown bulky dossiers in his failing arms
Furtive 
..Distraught
......A Visitor in his home
Nay..........A  thief in his fiefdom
He stalks a room......any room for a moment’s reprieve
The hand now less firm............somewhat shaky
The date a tussle with memory
Then the long unnoticed wait at the central reception desk
To ask for his patient the next bi-annual or trimestrial appointment
 ......patient
            like a Patient 
A whole life ministering to personal needs
.............................................................................of strangers
The life-long bachelor
 
“When you no more have the charge of the place…”
His eyes make as if to plead in lieu of an apology
 
Then abruptly the trimestrial rendez-vous stays open.....
................................................. un-confirmed
No excuse    no reason is proffered
Only by chance you surmise
             
.............................The frail fallen oak lies limp in some forsaken lot
 
Paris, August 1, 2004
 
(P.S. I used to accompany someone else to his consultation offices for some sixteen years, and many were the long and fruitful discussions that ensued during the visits.)
 
Professor Lapresle’s brilliant career-data: [I owe the details of his bio-data to his twin brother Dr. Claude Lapresle and to his brilliant student Professor Marie-Germaine BOUSSER, Head, Department of Neurology, Hôpital Lariboisière, 2, rue Ambroise Paré, 75010 Paris. I’ll also be including in the near future “a memorial oration” by Dr. Bousser in this volume of Asianists’ ASIA.]
 
Born in Paris on February 3rd 1921, together with his twin brother Claude, both of them finished their last four years’ of schooling at the prestigious Lycée Louis Le Grand, France’s elite lycée. And both went on to qualify, like their younger brother Pierre, as doctors at the Sorbonne’s renowned medical school. Dr. Claude Lapresle, an eminent specialist himself, is at the moment serving as Professeur Honoraire à l'INSTITUT PASTEUR and Médecin Honoraire (Honorary Doctor) des Hôpitaux de Paris (of the Hospitals in Paris).
 Professor Jean Lapresle passed away on December 2nd 2000 in harness.
 After graduating in 1946, he went on to obtain his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1950. His dissertation, La porphyrie aiguë intermittente. Etude anatomo-clinique was published in the same year by the Librarie Arnette, Paris. Even as a young internee, he was regularly contributing scholarly research papers in collaboration with other French medical greats, such as, Jean BERNARD and Raymond GARCIN.
 By 1961, he became Professor (agrégé) of Neurology and Psychiatry and was made a full professor without a chair in 1969. In 1972, he was appointed Professeur Titulaire à Titre Personnel at the Faculty of Medicine of the South. Head of the  Department (Service) of Neurology at the Centre Hospitalier de Kremlin-Bicêtre, in Paris, where he continued to serve as a Consultant right up to his demise, though in the final year his visits to the hospital continued to diminish.
 Among his distinguished achievements:
Médaille d’Honneur (Medal of Honour)  des Epidémies (1948)
Médaille d’Argent (Silver Medal) of the Faculty of Medicine, Paris (1951)
Prix Pierre Marie (Pierre Marie Prize) of the National Academy of Medicine (1954)
Prix Robert Bing of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (1968)
 
General-Secretary of the VIth International Congress of Neuropathology, Paris (1970)
Member (1970-74) and Vice-President (1974-78) of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Neuropathology
 Visiting Fellow in Neurology, Columbia University, New York (1950-51)
Visiting Professor of Neurology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine New York (1969)
Visiting Professor at the Veterans General Hospital and the National Yang-Ming Medical College, Taipei (1982)
 He also undertook Technical Cooperation Missions to MALAYSIA (1971), TUNIS (1964, 1975, & 1976), and SINGAPORE (1976).
 By 1984, he had already published, both under his own signature and those of his collaborators, some 196 research papers in scholarly journals, with a predilection for the Revue Neurologique.  Cf. Notice sur les Titres et Travaux Scientifiques du Professeur Jean Lapresle. Paris : Masson, 1984, 16p.
 Professor Lapresle’s contributions to his specialties, according to his own classification, come under three headings:
 1.  Thoroughly researched themes (etudes approfondies):
a)  his inaugural dissertation, followed up by neuro-psychiatric manifestations of porphyries;
b)  cerebral lesions of intoxication oxycarbonée;
c)   neuro-muscular and psychiatric determinations of maladies de collagèneé périartérite noueuse, dermatomyosite et polymyosite, lupus érythémateux aigu disséminé and more generally neuro-muscular pathology, especially taken on from the biopsy of muscles which is his very special contribution in neurological practice;
d)  atrophies cérébelleuses,  dégénérescences spino-cérébelleuses, névrites hypertrophiques primitives.
 2.  Articles based on clinical and /or anatomical observations which form a corpus of didactical material.
a)Articles which constitute a field of personal research which contribute towards a better understanding of certain facts, such as, in the realms of classification of méningiomes;
b) les douleurs médullaires de type spino-thalamique observées après cordotomie antéro-latérale ;
c)  le syndrome thalamique à topographie chéiro-orale et les syndromes thalamiques focaux ;
d) la dystasie aréflexique héréditaire de Roussy-Lévy ;
e)   les ramollissements de la moelle ;
f)   pathologie du fuseau neuro-musculaire ;
g)  étude ultrastructurale des lésions élémentaires du muscle et du nerf périphérique ;
h)   le couple olivo-dentelé et la voie dento-olivaire ;
i)  l’hypotrophie musculaire en clinique neurologique ;
j)   pathologie vasculaire des nerfs crâniens.  
 (c) T. Wignesan – August 1st., 2004 – Paris (Article published in Asianists’ ASIA, Vol. III (Paris), Edited by T. Wignesan)