Paul Cololian (1869–1956) : membre de la Société Médico-Psychologique (1902) et fondateur de l’Union des Médecins Arméniens de Paris (1920) et de la Croix-Rouge Arménienne de Paris (1922) (Partie I)

Abstract

Maksoud Boghos Cololian was born December 12, 1869 in Ortakeuy. It was a suburb of Constantinople. The young Maksoud Boghos was sent to the Armenian school of Berberian when he is expected to learn to read and write in. It was here he developed a taste for litterature and the knowledge of the French language thanks to a thorough instruction. When he completed his secondary schooling, he left Armenia for France. In September 1889, he registered at the faculty of medicine of Paris. Extern in 1891 then intern from the asylums of the Seine (1894), he was appointed doctor of medicine in 1898. Cololian acquired a deep knowledge of psychiatry under the direction of great specialists (Taguet, Briand, Magnan, Garnier). Member of the Société Médico-Psychologique in 1902, his happy memories of his non-residential internship in the department of Nicolas Augustin Gilbert (1858–1927) led him to practice general medicine. That is the speciality he dedicated to as a liberal, in Paris rue de Ponthieu, without forgetting his training in psychiatry. In the Rosenwald Book, his speciality was neuropsychiatry. Considering he was a former Ottoman subject and volunteer since the beginning of hostilities in 1914, Cololian became immediately naturalized French with the title of assistant major physician medical. He was appointed head physician of the physiotherapy centers of Versailles (VR 69 and 74), Grignon and the Officers’ Hospital at Versailles. Also, he named himself Paul. He took care of war-wounded and became a precursor in the field of mechano-therapeutic on one hand, and for the measurement of impotence and infirmities one the other hand. In 1918, Cololian was decorated with the Legion of Honor by Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) himself. Several times laureate of the Academy of Medicine and the Institute, Cololian wrote articles or memories on semiology and psychiatric treatment. He was with P. Garnier the author of a treatise on therapeutics of mental and nervous diseases (1901). Author of chronic hunting in the newspaper “Le Figaro”, medical and scientific popularization in the review “Guérir” and “La Femme et l’Enfant” and too informal written in “Les Annales politiques et littéraires”, Cololian published various articles or analyzes on studies based on morbid psychological constitutions from characters in literature, plays, movies or politics (Emma Bovary, Marie Lafarge, Hitler…). In his psychiatric and psychoanalytic reading of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Cololian asserted that the creator of Freudianism was Flaubert. Regarding psychoanalysis, he felt Freud's theory had been taken too far by the founder and mostly by his students.