Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857-1894

8. Medical Menace in Léon Daudet's Les Morticoles

8 Medical Menace in Léon Daudet’s Les Morticoles
At the beginning of a lengthy meditation on the medical profession, Montaigne writes about his kidney stones, a condition he believes he has inherited from his father, and then suggests that his skepticism regarding the efficacy of medical treatment is also hereditary: “I hope that physicians will forgive my frankness, because, by the same fatal infusion and insinuation, I have received my hatred and contempt for their teachings: this antipathy that I have for their art is hereditary.”1 Three centuries and many medical discoveries later, when medicine considered itself a science rather than an art, and when “heredity” had become the buzz word of a whole generation of physicians and writers, another son, one Léon Daudet, agonized over the physical ills that his father may have transmitted to him. However, lacking the selfknowledgethatMontaignesopainstakinglyacquiredthroughhiswriting , Daudet seems to have been less lucid in identifying the source of his contempt for the medical practitioner. It was in 1894, just three years before Alphonse Daudet would die the painful death of syphilis, that Léon published his justly famous invective against the Parisian medical profession, Les Morticoles. Denigrated as a “pamphlet” by scholars who objected to the rancorous tone and polemical structure, the novel was, by the author’s admission, a medical “anti-thesis.” Léon Daudet, having undertaken medical studies at the age of seventeen in hopes of understanding his father’s illness and perhaps even of finding a cure for it, had completed his course work but failed medical menace in les morticoles 159 the competitive examination for an internship in Paris, not through ignorance or lack of zeal but because he had managed to offend an influential member of the Paris medical faculty, Dr. Albert Robin. This, at any rate, is Daudet’s analysis of the situation.2 Like Flaubert, who explained in a letter to George Sand that he was writing Bouvard et Pécuchet in order to “spit up the venom that is choking me, that is, to tell a few truths, purge myself, and then be more Olympian,”3 Daudet conceived of the literary work in general and this work in particular as a therapeutic purge. For a novel inspired by hatred of the medical profession, the metaphor was certainly appropriate.4 Daudet came by this hatred naturally, for although it was his father who had encouraged him to pursue medical studies in the first place rather than follow his natural inclinations to become a writer, the elder Daudet had included in his fictional accounts of life in Second Empire society some extraordinarily unflattering portraits of the physician, as the example of Le Nabab illustrates dramatically. Ironically, perhaps, whereas the elder Daudet’s novel had few admirers among nineteenth-century critics, Léon Daudet’s Les Morticoles, “of which the literary worthlessness is obvious” according to one modern critic,5 received rather more favorable publicity at the time of its appearance although, understandably, most medical periodicals did not deign to review it, and it was virtually ignored for the first eighty years of the twentieth century.6 Like Le Nabab, Les Morticoles sold stunningly well. LikeLeNabab,itwasseenasadenunciationoftheideologicalfoundation of its era (in this case, the early Third Republic), and it fascinated critics who sought, usually with little difficulty, to strip the physiciancharacters of their fictional disguises. In contrast to Alphonse Daudet, who, when faced with this same obsession, attempted to underplay the resemblance between his characters and historical personages, the intrepid Léon Daudet counted upon readers’ acuity in identifying his real-life sources, for it was upon this recognition that his novel’s succès de scandale depended. Nevertheless, in order to avoid a lawsuit, he insisted that his fictional physicians were all composites, and it was not until 1940, with the publication of Quand vivait mon père, that he provided a “key” to his portraits. 160 medical menace in les morticoles WhatismostintriguingaboutLesMorticoles,publishedsomeseventeen years after Le Nabab and strikingly different in tone and ostensible subject, is the degree to which, at a more fundamental level, it resembles the elder Daudet’s novel. An analysis of Léon Daudet’s first-person narrative will allow us to illuminate the principles upon which this resemblance is based. “Comment sont vos matières et en général celles de vos camarades?” [Describe your feces and, in general, those of your...