Denise Albe‐Fessard (1916–2003)
2003; Wiley; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/j.ejpain.2003.11.010
ISSN1532-2149
Autores ResumoMy first contact with Professor Denise Albe-Fessard was in arranging to spend 1968 on sabbatical leave from Melbourne University in the Laboratoire de Physiologie des Centres Nerveux. The research laboratory of her chair in the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris, it was part of the Institut Marey directed by her husband, Alfred Fessard of the Collège de France. Their fame in brain neurophysiology was a magnet for younger aspirants such as myself, and for many others. From the time of our arrival in February 1968, Mme Fessard took solicitous interest in her visitors’ welfare. She tested my stumbling French in preliminary talks with Paul Feltz (with whom she introduced me to research on the basal ganglia) and said my conversation would soon become workable. She organised my elder son's entry to a classe de réadaptation at the secondary Collège Musset, where the Principal was a friend, and later introduced me to other neurophysiologists in France, such as Massion, Scherrer and Vincent, and through her friend Charles Downman in London to others in England. When my bourse expired, she arranged a temporary post as demonstrator, which enabled me to stay until the end of the year. On my second sabbatical there in 1976, she arranged my daughter's admission to the prestigious Lycée Molière in Passy, again through a friend who was the school Principal. These personal experiences exemplify the vast network of Albe-Fessard's academic friendships and acquaintances as well as her kindness to young colleagues. This kindness was manifested also in invitations to dinner including my wife and occasionally the children. Other visitors were often met for the first time at the Fessards’. Years later I was invited to stay at her house in Finisterre, where with her son Jean she showed me over a “boat church” after dining in a local quayside restaurant. Mme Fessard took seriously her educational duties in the formation of post-graduate students and as mentor to “stagiaires” like me, where she applied the scientific qualities of vigour, insight, and measured experimental involvement, already marked in her early definitive research on electric organ discharge and its central control. In recent years her didactic gifts were employed splendidly in her wise textbook on pain, designed for advanced students (Albe-Fessard, 1996), and in a thoughtful review of pathological pain mechanisms for physiotherapists (Albe-Fessard, 2001). Her curiosity was ever-present. In 1983 she visited Australia for the IUPS congress in Sydney, where she asked me to show her the Pacific Ocean from its western side, for comparison with California. She then participated in the first meeting of the International Basal Ganglia Society held on the Southern Ocean near Melbourne. Before the exhausting return to Paris, she stayed at my house and showed great interest in suburban food markets and the choice of fish, cooking it with ease and skill. When Présidente D'Honneur of the Fourth International Basal Ganglia Society meeting on the Côte D'Azur in 1992, she took time to gently admonish me that at my age I should be vaccinated annually against influenza, which I had caught. In 1994 I obtained through her influence a grant from a Collège de France foundation to aid my research for a History of the Institut Marey, now complete; she gave me frequent assistance and information, with anecdotes, documents and explanations. Looking again at tributes offered by foreign colleagues for her 80th birthday dinner, I am struck by the admiring affection that Mme Fessard inspired in her world-wide scientific collaborators, young and old. They provide great insight into phases of her scientific life as reflected in their different memories. She asked me to translate and help edit her Autobiography for the Society of Neuroscience (1996). In frequent interchanges between Paris and Melbourne she did not always accept my viewpoint, but was reasonable when offered convincing argument. She once told me that she always accepted journal reviewers’ advice on her articles. In the 1990s, Mme Fessard asked me to recommend English fiction reading that could help improve her facility with the language; Dickens, she told me, was too hard. She was particularly pleased with Trollope's “Barchester Towers”, and liked Thackeray's “Henry Esmond”, but I received no feed-back on some others I had given her. My last visit to the rue des Peupliers was two years ago. After some hard work on historical matters, Mme Fessard suggested a walk to the nearby Parc de l'île St.-Germain, on a large Seine island. She explained that the buildings had been stables for Napoleonic cavalry. Our path skirted a field dominated by the 24 m of Dubuffet's Tour aux Figures, then reached the reconstructed gardens that had formerly grown provisions for the army. We passed by houseboats moored on the narrow Issy arm of the Seine, and finished the circuit passing children at play and their attendant adults. Mme Fessard told me how she liked to bring her adored grand-daughter Karine to this park. Once again, she had opened my eyes to new aspects of Paris. At the end of last year, she sent me her contributory chapter to an American book on primate stereotaxy for translation, needed urgently by the editor Blaine Nashold. On May 9, I received a message from Jean Fessard announcing the death of his mother two days earlier. The shock to me was shared by friends, former students and colleagues. Many must also have felt, against all reason, that Mme Fessard should be indestructible. The reality now strikes us: that we have lost in Denise Albe-Fessard a great investigator of the brain, a great teacher and mentor, and a true, strong-minded friend.
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