The picturesque town of Bergerac, capital of Périgord Pourpre, (Purple Perigord), reposes serenely on the banks of the Dordogne River not far from the Pyrenees in southwestern France.

With its rolling hills, verdant landscapes, gothic castles and battlements, Bergerac, called “the city of a thousand and one castles” is a veritable beacon for students of French history. The temperate climate is perfect for growing wine grapes and vineyards abound making Bergerac a force in the world of French vintners. In addition to wine and history, the variety of country cuisine including rich magret de canard (a regional dish made from duck breasts), pâté de foie gras and truffles justifies the rustic enclave’s well deserved reputation as a “gourmet’s paradise”. Bergerac is also the birthplace of one of 19th Century Paris’s most distinguished personages, the legendary and ultimately tragic Dr. Samuel-Jean Pozzi. Pozzi is noted in modern medical circles as an early pioneer in the field of women’s health, but to a discerning and growing audience of art lovers, he is the extraordinarily handsome subject of John Singer Sargent’s famed portrait, Dr. Pozzi at Home. The composition, color and remarkably contemporary beauty of the painting can overwhelm anyone lucky enough to stand in front of this stunning study in crimson. Sargent was enamored with the Spanish art tradition and the masterful execution of the piece would have made Velasquez himself proud. It was Sargent who first described the elegant physician in a letter to Henry James as “a very brilliant creature.” He most certainly was.

Since the Reformation, Bergerac has been one of the few seats of Protestantism in Catholic France.

19th century Bergerac was a far cry from the cosmopolitan center it has become. The rustic village was hewn of solid stone and became an enclave for the French Reform Church, a sanctuary that managed to survive despite the brutal, anti-Protestant scourges of the 16th Century by the Catholic Kings, Henry II and Charles IX. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Bergerac remained a haven for Protestants fleeing persecution. 

Samuel-Jean Pozzy (Pozzy is the French spelling, pronounced "Poe-zee") was born on October 3, 1846, the product of two bloodlines, Italian-Swiss on his father’s side with French Protestant maternal lineage. Both families had been firmly entrenched in Bergerac for generations. According to family lore, the first Pozzy was an honest and courageous Italian farmer who was burned for his Protestant faith in the temple of Teglio, after a Catholic counter-attack in 1620. Samuel’s grandfather, Dominique Pozzy, was a deputy for the Dordogne province during the French First Republic while his father, Benjamin Dominique Pozzy, was a minister of the Reformed Church of France, an austere Calvinistic denomination that believed people were divinely predestined for either heaven or eternal damnation (i.e. double predestination.)

Benjamin Pozzy was a true believer at the vanguard of evangelical Protestantism. He spearheaded the 11th Synod of the Union of Evangelic Churches of France and in response to the religious apprehension that was rampant in late 19th century France, authored Ecclesiastical Skepticism, a religious tract published in Paris in 1868. It was in this environment of staunch Protestant values that the Pozzy children were reared; while Benjamin labored to save souls, Samuel’s mother, the delicate Inès Escot-Meslon, occupied herself with nurturing the family in the ancestral home, La Graulet. 

After her marriage, in short order Inès gave birth to five children, Marie in 1845, Samuel-Jean in 1846, Sara in 1848, Lois in 1850 and finally, Paul in 1855. Unfortunately for the Pozzy family, Inès’s health was fragile, possibly because of assaults from repeated pregnancies and a difficult confinement after Paul’s birth. Given the high incidence of puerperal fever, an infection of the uterus contracted during or right after the delivery of a child, it is not surprising that Inès died prematurely at the age of thirty-six. In addition to “childbed fever”, pregnant women, in the days prior to both antiseptics and antibiotics, faced the prospect of dying in childbirth. Caesarean procedures were always performed post mortem and if a woman actually survived childbirth, she faced additional attacks on her sexual organs from lesions of the vulva, uterine prolapse and obstetric fistulas. Is there any surprise that childbirth held little joy for women throughout most of the 19th century?

Samuel was ten years old when Inès passed away, an event that has led Pozzi scholars to speculate on whether his mother’s early demise may have caused his subsequent interest in the field of gynecology. Benjamin was faced with raising five children but did not remain single for long. A search of the marriage records from Tansley, a hamlet in Derbyshire, England, reveals that on October 19th, 1859, Benjamin Pozzy was living in the town of Pau and married a young British woman from Tansley, Mary Anne Kempe. Samuel was fluent in English from an early age and it is entirely possible that Samuel-Jean acquired his fluency in spoken and written English from his stepmother. The elder Pozzy’s nuptial bliss was short-lived for the eldest child, Marie, died in 1860 at the age of fifteen from typhoid fever. The Pozzy family was again faced with the specter of death; there is only speculation on how the death of Marie, a delicate, doe-eyed adolescent, from a preventable disease, affected her younger brother. Typhoid fever was a disease spawned by poor sanitation and an absence of hygiene that frequently killed in the 19th and early 20th century. Years later, when Samuel became a Senator from Bergerac in the 1890’s, one of his early acts was to ensure the town received modern water works.

Benjamin and the new Madame Pozzy went on to have two children of their own, Helene and Adrien; Samuel, now the oldest Pozzy child, commenced his formal education in lycées in both Pau and Bordeaux. It was at that time in his adolescence that his fellow students nicknamed the angelic-faced youth with an appellation that followed him throughout his early career in Paris…La Sirène. 

References

The photographs of the Pozzy family are courtesy of the Bergerac Museum. Thanks to Dr. Caroline de Costa for translating portions of Samuel Pozzi – Chirurgien et ami des femmes, by Claude Vanderpooten. Thank you Bruce S. Winslow, PhD for contacting Fatiha Ait Bouzyou and Maitre Gaillard from the City of Bergerac and for obtaining information about the origins of the Pozzi family.
Please visit the offical site of the city of Bergerac by clicking here.