Musée Flaubert et d'Histoire de la Médecine

A genuinely odd double-museum: half devoted to Gustave Flaubert (born here in 1821), half to the history of medicine, the family's other business. The Flaubert rooms preserve furniture and personal effects from his childhood; the medical rooms hold an unsettling collection of obstetrical mannequins, prosthetics, amputation saws, and a 19th-century operating chair.

It's a small house, an hour will do it, and it's strange in the best French provincial-museum way. A short walk from the cathedral, on the grounds of the modern hospital.

things to do museum
A story
Gustave Flaubert grew up in this house — his father was the chief surgeon at the adjacent Hôtel-Dieu hospital, and the family lived on the premises. The young Flaubert listened to medical conversations at dinner and watched dissections through his window, an upbringing that shaped the clinical eye of Madame Bovary.