What The French Saw That The Americans Didn’t
When Bessie Blount flew to France in 1952 and presented her feeding device to the French government, they accepted it.
This acceptance raises an obvious question: what did the French see that the Americans didn’t?
Several factors may have contributed.
France had its own wounded veterans from the wars of the twentieth century, including World War II and the ongoing First Indochina War (which would continue until 1954). French military hospitals had real, current patients who needed the kind of device Blount had built.
The French government, as a national government evaluating a practical medical device, may have been less concerned about the specific institutional credibility of the inventor than the VA appeared to be. What mattered was whether the device worked. And it did.
France may also have been less constrained by the racial dynamics that shaped American institutional response. Blount was a Black American woman. In France, where the racial categories of American society were experienced differently by visiting Americans of the period, her racial identity may have been less of an obstacle in her dealing with official institutions.
The account in Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History notes that the VA turned down Blount’s offer to sell the device for $100,000, and that she “decided to donate her invention to the French government, which would go on to use it in military hospitals countrywide.”
The word “countrywide” is significant: this was not a token adoption of a single device for a single hospital. The French government used the device across their military hospital system. They recognized its practical value and deployed it at scale.
The same device that American veterans could have used — the device that was directly relevant to the specific, documented need of American amputee veterans — was being used for French veterans instead, because the American institution responsible for those veterans’ care had said no.