Médecine, sciences de la vie et littérature en France et en Europe de la Révolution à nos jours, i : Herméneutique et clinique; ii : L’Âme et le corps réinventés; iii : Le Médecin entre savoirs et pouvoirs ed. by Lise Dumasy-Queffélec, and Hélène Spengler (review)

As the title indicates, the editors of these three volumes have set themselves an ambitious goal. The articles collected here were generated by the Équipe Traverses 19–21 between 2004 and 2008, and they make for a publication that covers an immense range of topics. Inevitably, the sheer extent of the subject matter entails methodological omissions, as a result of which the seventy-four articles do not always combine persuasively into a coherent whole. The inclusion of the life sciences, for example, even if there are a number of chapters focusing on topics other than medicine, indicates the need for an all-inclusive concept allowing the editors to link together this mass of disparate material. Perhaps the most frustrating oversight is that there is no contextualization of how approaches from the ‘medical humanities’ have understood the tangled relationship between literature and medicine in recent decades. Lise Dumasy-Queffélec proposes in the General Introduction that ‘le rapport médecin/patient comme figure du rapport auteur/lecteur, voir écrivain/corps social est également à étudier, pendant toute la période considérée’ ( i, 13), which is a precept so close to this field of research that this should have been acknowledged, particularly since the volumes propose also to look beyond France. About a quarter of the contributions focus on other European (and some non- European) texts and contexts, and ‘literature’ is defined in very open terms (‘poésie, fiction romanesque et théâtrale, et aussi textes d’idées, politiques, scientifiques et philosophiques’, i, 10) that occasionally also allow for chapters on film, visual art, and music. These and other issues of methodological fine-tuning (‘medicine’ is understood in the broadest sense) compromise the overall rigour of the project; however, if consulted selectively, the three volumes are immensely rewarding and offer many fine essays.

It helps that each volume is given a distinct title, and the editors have further attempted to narrow down their volume-specific focus with separate introductory chapters. The first volume assesses the image of the physician and questions how medicine produces power structures and forms of interpretation; the second sets out to analyse clashes between materialism and spiritualism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the final volume returns to an analysis of the role of the physician and examines the resulting relationship between medicine and fiction. The three subsections of the first volume (‘Interpréter’; ‘Juger’; ‘Soigner’) consider the ways in which the clinical gaze may be capable of creating entire social pathologies, an example of which Jean-Dominique Goffette sees in Balzac’s idea of the ‘Paris monstre’, a social body endangered by degeneracy and death ( i, 42), and which, as Gaëlle Le Dref outlines in her examination of theories of social Darwinism and degeneracy, ultimately culminates in anti-humanism. Even if the significance of Foucault is only briefly mentioned ( i, 35), a key theme of the volume — the tension between normal and pathological, and the physician as mediator between the two—is masterfully presented in Jean-Jacques Courtine’s postscript, which explores the ‘ médicalisationdu champ du regard’ ( i, 413; emphasis in the original) and the fundamental role of the physician in shaping this gaze from 1840 to 1940. In his chapter on Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s doctoral thesis on Ignaz Semmelweis, Shane Lillis importantly emphasizes the side effects of that gaze, namely that...