Albert Besson

Albert Besson (1896–1965) was a French hygienist, physician and member of the French Académie Nationale de Médecine.

In 1916, as officer cadet, he was seriously injured at the fort Vaux, during the battle of Verdun, after saving wounded soldiers, and at first, was considered as dead *.

On the way to recovery, he went back to the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, and published his first work even before the end of World War I (see below), on relationship with the war diseases. Although he was originally a bacteriologist, he defended his thesis of medicine in the service of professor Levy-Valensi, psychiatrist, who remained one of his best friends.

Elected as general councillor of Paris in 1929, and deputy chairman of the council of Paris and departement of the Seine in 1933, he was back to medicine in 1936 as general director of the Town of Paris Laboratories.

In the 1950s he promoted the vaccination against poliomyelitis, looked after the water quality for the inhabitants of Paris, obtained a law forbidding the hooter in town, and was one of the first to alert the authorities and the public about atmospheric and acoustic pollution. He was elected as a member of the French "Academie de Médecine" in 1956.

At the end of his life, he was also asked to give lectures about human habitation hygiene at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris, where future empress Farah Diba was one of his students. In this time, he was also elected as a member of the Agriculture Academy.

At the Academy of Medicine, he was Professor Jean Quenu's colleague, Both had their summer residence in the fishers village of Audresselles.

Albert Besson was painter Maurice Boitel's father in law.

Sources:

His main work is "l'hygiène de l'habitation", in which he made the link between medicine and architecture. At the beginning of the 20th century, slums were still numerous in the town centers, and Albert Besson put as an evidence that, dark, damp and overcrowded, they were the main source of epidemics, chiefly tuberculosis and diphtheria.

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