Louis Hubert Farabeuf

Who was Louis Hubert Farabeuf?

Dr. Louis Hubert Farabeuf, French surgeon who is said to have introduced hygiene in French medical schools. His statue dominates the central court of the National School of Medicine in Paris whose main amphitheater is also named after him. Farabeuf wrote some short surgical booklets and designed several medical instruments that are still in use today. His passionate writings and descriptions of amputation surgery attracted the attention of writers and scholars interested in the aesthetics of eroticism. Salvador Elizondo wrote a cryptic biography of Farabeuf in which he emphasized and exaggerated the surgeon’s morbid eroticism. It is through this “secret classic of the aesthetics of evil” that Farabeuf is mostly known, as Elizondo's work was translated in half a dozen languages. Elizondo presented Farabeuf also as a French secret agent in China after the Boxer Rebellion, who worked secretly for the French Jesuits in sketching a plan for the evangelization of China. Elizondo mixed in Farabeuf, or the chronic of an instant events that he borrowed from the lives of Dupuytren, Muybridge, Daguerre, Nadar, and others.