[Félicien Rops: medicine, doctors, and his diseases (part one)]

Félicien Rops was among the 19th-century's finest draughtsmen and Belgium's most sulphurous artist. Rops was born in Namur in 1833. He began to study law at the Free University of Brussels in 1851, joined a rowdy circle of students and began drawing the kind of caricatures and sharp satirical lithographs that would later gain him open-armed acceptance in the artistic and literary circles in Paris. As draughtsman and engraver, Rops has illustrated medical subjects such as "The massage", "Speculum", "Experimental medicine" "My gout". Rops was also a prolific letter-writer. In his correspondence, he spoke about his real or imaginary diseases: measles, gout, typhoid fever and typhus, congestion of the lung, phosphatous diabetes, nervous break-down, congestion of the brain, ocular injury, cardiac insufficiency. Rops' illnesses are discussed according to the medical knowledge at the time of Rops and to those of nowadays.