The purpose of this site is to present Claude Hamonet’s works. He is a Physician, specialist in Rehabilitation Medicine, PhD in Social Anthropology, former Counsel before the principal Court of Appeal, Emeritus Professor, former Physician at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital (Paris, France), Ehlers-Danlos Syndrom (EDS) consultation.

On this site, you can find:

• Professor Hamonet's biography
• A list of Pr. Hamonet's publications and communications
• News and informations
• A glossary for medical rehabilitation and handicapology terms
• A selection of articles about medicine, disability and rehabilitation
• An appendix and external links
• A section dedicated to the Ehlers-Danlos Syndrom (EDS)

 

Introduction to the works of
Professor Claude HAMONET

I am from a family of Breton physicians for which the human and social dimension coupled with a devotion to the “sick person” – become, by medical Anglicization of language, the “patient” – constituted the ethics basis of the profession without further consideration. This has conditioned a very early choice (from the third year of medicine in Rennes) of a type of exercise of medicine whose objective is to make evolve not only the medical condition but also the social situation and the vision of the life of the sick or traumatized person and his close relations. I refer to the “physical and Rehabilitation medicine” which, at the time (1959), was only at the beginning of its gestation.

A course as a medical student in one of the first French department of Rehabilitation medicine for victims of poliomyelitis epidemics, put in place by a pioneer, inhabitant of Rennes, Professor Denys Leroy, has been decisive.

As a medical student in Paris, I worked with Professor André Grossiord, another pioneer of the specialty of physical and Rehabilitation medicine and founder of our specialty in France, at the hospital Raymond Poincaré in Garches.

All my training in France, and then in the USA and Quebec (as a fellow, gold medal of the Residents of Paris hospitals) has been turned toward the acquisition of a maximum of medical, technical, organizational and social knowledge in this area, then a wasteland in our country. The determination was to be as useful and effective as possible to the construction of a new global, medical, humanistic and social approach around what we started to call “the Handicap”.

This unusual choice in medicine has led me to many exciting experiences:

• Organization of the care and rehabilitation:
  Creation and organization of services in the CHU Henri Mondor and in the hospital Albert Chenevier (Créteil), of one of the first central services of Rehabilitation Medicine, in a hospital in acute care in France, on a Quebecian model (Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal).
  Establishment of the rehabilitation of children with a muscular dystrophy in the Corbeil-Essonne Rehabilitation Center (Association of the paralyzed in France).
  Creation of the first services of care and education from home (SSESD, become SESAD) in three departments of the Eastern Île-de-France with, there again, the Association of the paralyzed in France.
  Organization of the services of physical and Rehabilitation medicine, the training of specialists and paramedical personnel, and the social rehabilitation in Algeria.
  Organization with the “Amicale marocaine des handicapés” (AMH) of the first hospital-center of Physical and Rehabilitation medicine in Morocco, NOOR, near Casablanca.
  Implementation, with the Ministry of Social Affairs of Tunisia’s Institute for the promotion of the disabled, of a handicap evaluation device at a national level.
• Clinical Researches: definition, measurement and evaluation of disability, ethics and anthropology of persons in a situation of disability; occupational therapy, speech therapy, apparatus by orthotics of the hand in particular, upper limb amputees’ apparatus (myo-electric prosthesis), development of robotics for situations of disability. The persons concerned by these applications had muscular dystrophy, breast cancer, Parkinson's disease, Brain injury, and back-pain (creation of the first “back-school” in France). Rehabilitation to the effort has been a field of important clinical research, in particular with coronarian patients but also for people with AIDS, overweight or Recklinghausen disease…
• Research in technology applied to persons with a situation of disability: medical robotics applied to persons with disabilities (invention of a myo-electric orthesis for people with a quadriplegia, environment control, bio-myo-feed-back…) with active participation in the development of the biomechanics applied to disability (research and education, in connection with engineers’ schools and technology academics) that has led me to be one of 12 research experts, representing France to the European Communities in Brussels during several years.
• Anthropology of handicap. A long and continuous research on the identification of disability and its measurement, including all biomedical, psychological, social and economic data, research on the intentional and non-intentional violence, their effects and the concept of victim, with the application in the field of forensic medicine. This required a detour through social Anthropology with the achievement and the dissertation in the University of Paris 5 (1993) of a thesis about disability anthropology and the exclusion mechanisms, and the creation of a Universitary department (Faculty) of Communication and inclusion in society at the University Paris 12-Val-de-Marne, structure I have headed for five years, followed by a stay of Associate Professor of Disability Anthropology during 5 months at the University of Kansas (U.S.A.) in 1993.

Exchange with "emerging" or at war countries have punctuated and fed my thoughts, in particular with Algeria, where I’ve been teaching for 4 years and created the speciality of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, but also with Morocco, Tunisia, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Togo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon.

The final objective of this is to give an identity and a future to people with disabilities through a new comprehensive, positive and rewarding approach: the identification and measurement of handicap system that I have proposed with the Professor Teresa Magalhaes from the Forensic Institute of the University of Porto, helped by Marie de Jouvencel, Neuropsychologist, and by Professor Louise Gagnon from Montreal. This new comprehensive approach, focusing on the person, forms a consistent medico-social link between health and society. This link is fit to replace the Gordian knot of disability where still prevail the prejudices, the corporatism, bureaucratic stigmatization and poorly understood economic conceptions. The absence of a common and clear language maintains the misunderstandings and incomprehension, and prevents an effective progression. The problem that remains thoroughly is the use of erroneous, incomplete and changing definitions of what is yet simple and a daily concern: the situations of disability.

My activity continues in this direction and the renovated (sixth) edition of the “Que sais-je” series’ persons with disabilities, now Persons in a situation of disability, is a concrete evidence.

But I also decided to face another difficult medical and social problem: the situation of persons with a Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It is a genetic disease that undermines the connective tissue and collagen. Its manifestations, discrete to a very great disability, are variable. It is very poorly known by doctors who often confuse with other diseases, neurological, rheumatologic, respiratory, gastroenterological or ENT, which leads to extremely painful diagnosis errors for the persons concerned, too often given of the commentary “it’s all in your mind”. I spend most of my activity as clinician and researcher in the diagnosis, but also the treatment and the social integration of people who are affected, from the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris where I created, in the Department of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (Dr J. Y. Maigne), a specialized consultation for this syndrome with the establishment of a treatment program by the physical and rehabilitation medicine.

 

The S.I.M.H. scheme of Disability (Créteil - Porto - Montréal, 1999)

 

 

Schematization for an Anthropology of the individual,
introducing the concept of situation of disability
(Teresa Magalhaes and Claude Hamonet, Créteil-Porto-Montréal, 1999)