User:Typhoeus/Auguste Marie

Auguste Marie, born Auguste Armand Victor Marie on February 16th 1865 was a french psychiatrist, known for founding the "family colony" of Dun-sur-Auron and for his collection, studies and exhibitfs of the art created by his patients.

He was also mayor of the town of Orly from 1920 until his death on July 29th 1834.

Auguste Marie was born on February 16, 1865, in the town of Voiron.

Early life
He was the son of Auguste-André Marie, a violin teacher, and his wife Joséphine Girod, a piano teacher.

Auguste Marie studied both medicine and law.

Founding the family colony
After his study in Scotland, Auguste Marie was given the task by the Seine administration to found a « family colony », taking its inspiration from the Scottish system as well as the example of Geel, a Belgian town where foster care for the mentally ill has existed since the middle-ages.

The family colony was conceived as a family foster care institution, wherein psychiatric patients who were considered "quiet" and "safe" were allowed to live outside asylums, onboarded in the homes of foster familes, in better conditions and with more freedom to come and go.

The goal was also to relieve the asylum of the department which were overcrowded and a financial burden to the Seine department.

The town chosen by the department administration was Dun-sur-Auron in the Cher department, 272 km from Paris.

Auguste Marie founded the family colony, participating in the selection of the first batch of patients sent to experiment the new system. The first patient were exclusively older women suffering from some form of dementia or senility.

He himself moved to the town of Dun with his parents, and became the first director of the newly founded colony, which he went on to be for the next eight years.

In 1898, he gave a talk on the success of foster care for the mentally ill. Two years later, one of the colony's secondary infirmaries in Ainay-le-Château, was turned into another colony, separately managed and meant for male patients.

In Dun, Auguste Marie also married his wife, Daria Mirvoda, daughter of a russian lawman he had met at a congress. Their daughter Irène was also born there,.

Villejuif
From 1900, Auguste Marie was a psychiatrist at the Villejuif asylum, directing the men's section, where he succeeded Charles Vallon.

As psychiatrist, Auguste Marie was mindful of letting his patients practice some forms of arts or other crafts.

At this time he started reflecting on the possibility of exhibiting their artworks in a museum ,, an idea he argued for in hs 1905 article Le musée de la folie (The madness museum). He set up spaces to exhibit the collections in the attics of the hospital, which the patients tended for and enriched, but this "museum" was not open to the public,{{Sfn|Couet|

As far as Marie was concerned, the goal of such a collection and exhibition was on one hand to bring back his patients to "rational activity" and on the other hand to emphasize the sometimes arbitrary barrier between the « insane » and the rest of humanity. He was fond of saying that the difference between insanity and sanity was partial and a matter of degree, not of essence. In this, he was opposed to Cesare Lombroso's vision on the subject of artistic creativity and genius.

In 1908, a man came to the small staff house he lived in, within the asylum grounds, and attempted to kill him with a gun. Marie was shot multiple times but his wounds were only superficial.

He related this experience a few years later in 1911, after his colleague Aimé Guinard was killed in similar circumstances, in an article in which he explained the risks that psychiatric doctors took. In this article he also presented a variety of object built by patients to either escape or kill the people that were keeping them.

First world war
In 1914, although he was far past the age of mandatory mobilisation, he volunteered in the army and became médecin-major for the 95th infantry regiment but his service was short : on the 26th of september he was wounded on the head and was evacuated away from the frontline.

For the remainder of the war he was a military physician, first at the Allies Hospital on the Arago boulevard in Paris, then at the army's laboratory from 1916 to 1918.

Sainte-Anne
After the war, Marie resumed work at Villejuif for two years. In 1920, he was named at the Sainte-Anne Hospital Center, first directing outside consultation, then directing the men's section a year later.

He was the first in France to experiment with malariathérapie, a method of curing neurosyphilis where patients are deliberately infected with a strain of malaria and invented by austrian physician Julius Wagner-Jauregg. Within the hospital he created a center of malaria therapy, the centre d'impaludation en 1923.

From 1926, he was director of the admission service at Sainte-Anne.

In 1927, thanks to the help of a mecene, the marquise de Ludre-Frolois, Auguste Marie managed to realize his project of a museum with a first exhibition at the Vavin-Raspail gallery.

Two years later, at the Max Bine gallery, he once again created an exhibition for artwork created by psychiatric patients. The exhibition showed art from the collections of the marquise, from that of Marie himself, but also from his colleagues, such as Joseph Rogues de Fursac. Some the works showed were acquired by other collectors, notably André Breton, ,.

Marie retired from the hospitals in 1929.

Mairie d'Orly
Auguste Marie was elected mayor of the town of Orly en 1920. As a hygienist, member of the republican-Socialist Party, he involved himself in the electrification and installation of running water on the commune's territory, and founded a garden-city in 1927.

He was also élected as representative to the department's conseil général and extended his activities to the entire arrondissement for which he was a representatitve

He also founded a clinic in the manor of Grignon.

Auguste Marie died on the 29th of july 1934.

Legacy
After he died, Auguste Marie's collection was divided. Thanks to Jean Dubuffet, a large part was donated in 1966 to the Collection de l'art brut, in Lausanne.

Another part was added to the collections of the Art and History museum of the Sainte-Anne hospital.

Works by Auguste Marie

 * L'assistance des aliénés en Écosse, 1892
 * La Démence, 1906
 * Mysticisme et folie : étude de psychologie normale et pathologique comparées, 1907
 * Traité International de Psychologie pathologique et de thérapeutique des maladies mentales en 3 tomes, 1910, 1911, 1912, Alcan
 * La Réforme de l'assistance aux aliénés, 1928