Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat — and believe me, it’s teeming with delights — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way.
But just to get you started: Pozzi (1846–1918), the man John Singer Sargent painted, gloriously, in sumptuous red, was a Frenchman, a prominent, pioneering doctor in Belle Epoque Paris, and a charming, ubiquitous, infallibly seductive socialite. (‘Disgustingly handsome’ is how the Princess of Monaco described him.) He was Sarah Bernhardt’s doctor and also her lover; she called him ‘Docteur Dieu’. (His other nickname was ‘L’Amour médecin’, which Barnes translates as Dr Love.)
In the introduction to his ground-breaking two-volume treatise on gynaecology, Pozzi wrote: ‘Chauvinism is one of the forms of ignorance.’ In his inaugural lecture as the first professor of gynaecology in all of France he declared that ‘conscience must be the first characteristic of a doctor, especially one who wields a knife’.
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