Guillaume Lachenal (Sciences Po) will present: 

THE ARCHEOLOGY OF A POSTCOLONIAL HOSPITAL IN NORTH PARIS. THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF A HEAP OF RUBBLE.

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Guillaume Lachenal will present his ongoing research on the history of the Claude Bernard hospital in Paris on behalf of the ANRS archive project (Archeology of HIV in Paris), with Gaetan Thomas (University of Michigan), Johan Lagae and Simon de Nys Ketel (Department of Architecture, University of Ghent) as co-investigators. The hospital, which was demolished in 1990s, has been a major site of Aids care and research and remains an important site in memories of the Aids epidemic in Paris. Its total erasure from the urban landscape is the initial enigma for the spatial and historical investigation of the hospital's history and of its « present absence » in Paris. Along with a team of architects and historians, Lachenal explores how a spatial, place-based, approach of medical history can help reconnect and concatenate histories of epidemic control, colonial medicine, postcolonial migration and the Aids crisis. Combining urban ethnography and oral history, and starting literally from a « heap of rubble », the inquiry investigates mourning, neoliberal gentrification, sheltering and marginality in this peculiar place marked by a heavy industrial and medical history.

GUILLAUME LACHENAL is a Professor in History of Science at Sciences Po, médialab. His work builds a conversation between the History of Medicine, African Studies and Planetary Health. He is the author of The Lomidine Files. The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in Colonial Africa (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) and of The Doctor Who Would Be King (Duke University Press, 2022).