What if, between technical skill and intuition, between accumulated experience and mystery, there was another way of inhabiting the world?
As part of the Histoire et Cité Festival, whose theme for 2026 is “Like Magic” and which explores the shifting boundaries between science and the supernatural, Philo aux Bains is pleased to welcome Virginie Jean, a cow bone-setter.
Contrary to a strictly technical view of animal care, her work is part of an ancient tradition: that of bone setters, who, through touch, careful observation, listening to the body, and empirical knowledge often transmitted outside academic settings, relieve, restore, and rebalance.
Is this popular knowledge? An art of gesture? A form of magic?
What does “healing” mean when working with living beings, in close contact with their bodies?
How can we think about these practices in a world dominated by scientific veterinary medicine? Opposition, complementarity, coexistence?
This meeting will be an opportunity to explore the tensions—but also the possible dialogues—between rationality and belief, tradition and modernity, the visible and the invisible.
Throughout the discussion, we will also question our contemporary relationship with living beings: what does caring for animals say about our way of being in the world? What is legitimate knowledge? Who decides what belongs to science and what is relegated to folklore?
The meeting will take place at Les Bains des Pâquis.