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

Donaldson-Evans, Mary. Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857-1894. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000. Pp. xiii + 240. ISBN 0-8032-6628-6

I was simply carried away with Mary Donaldson-Evans's book and read it very nearly at one sitting. Both specialists and general readers interested in nineteenth-century French literature and culture will find it entrancing. Although the book shows thorough research and impeccable documentation, as well as wide knowledge of both nineteenth-century literature and medicine, it is wonderfully free of jargon, with clear prose and lightning strikes of wit.

Given recent interest in the broad field of sickness as a literary topos, the timing for the Donaldson-Evans book is excellent. The author is well aware that this is not the first time scholars have been drawn to the subject of medicine and literature. Charles Bernheimer, Peter Brooks, Jean-Louis Cabanès, Christopher Lloyd, Rae Beth Gor-don, and myself, among others, have addressed the matter. I know of no other study, however, that deals with the interplay of medical and literary discourse. In addition, the book's analyses include perspicacious insights into the Industrial Revolution, the rise in literacy and the concomitant development of mass media, the birth of capitalism, the emergence of a French feminist movement, and the increasing secularization of society in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Several of the chapters take a new look at well-known masterpieces. I think par-ticularly of the chapters on Madame Bovary and L'Assommoir, where the references to both medical literature and attitudes about the medical profession enhance dazzling textual analyses of startling originality. Even with less notable novels like Madame Gervaisais, not only does Donaldson-Evans successfully add to our understanding of the importance of medical discourse to that of literature, she succeeds, as well, in awakening interest and pointing to parallels in contexts that raise the Goncourts's mechanical artistry to something more worthy of our attention. In Chapter 4, she explicates the medical discourse that Huysmans has exploited to expose and vilify the foolishness of naturalism's scientific pretentions, the pathological deterioration of contemporary art, and the shallowness of the middle class. In Chapter 5, she reveals an iconoclastic representation of Maupassant's doctors as pathological specimens. In Chapter 6 she cuts to the intersection of literary and medical discourse, showing how they are interrelated and interdependent in Daudet's Le Nabab. And in the last two chapters (7 and 8) she lays open Maupassant's and Daudet's virulent satire of the entire medical profession. Throughout, her own knowledge of medical literature and of literary tradition leaves no doubt about the way the two discourses work together. Nineteenth-century literati were aware of the limits of medical science and cynical about the widespread discourse. Holding medicine up for mockery, they also revealed the larger disaffection with science that grew throughout the century and became particularly acute after 1885. As Donaldson-Evans reveals the warp and woof of medicine and literature, she simultaneously exposes writers' scalpels as they sadis-tically fray and cut the discourse of medical people into tattered rags.

Mary Donaldson-Evans's Medical Examinations stands comfortably as an out-standing addition to our understanding of how literature uses and simultaneously attacks an institution, of the way literature and medicine intersect in the last half of the nineteenth-century, of culture playing a major role in the creation of art. The author's knowledge of nineteenth-century medicine, of the novelists' other creations, of the religious tradition, and of contemporary art criticism join with her own skills as a formal critic to make this an exceptionally fine contribution.

Allan H. Pasco, University of Kansas

 

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