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Reviewed by:
  • Littérature et médecine: Approches et perspectives (XVIe–XIXe siècles)
  • Matthew Ramsey
Carlino, Andrea, and Alexandre Wenger , eds. Littérature et médecine: Approches et perspectives (XVIe–XIXe siècles). Geneva: Droz, 2007. Pp. 288. ISBN 978-2-600-01146-4

The twelve papers in this collection come from a conference held in 2005 at the medical center of the University of Geneva. They range widely in scope, covering three countries and as many centuries. Nine are primarily or exclusively concerned with France, two with Italy, and one with England. Three concern the sixteenth century, seven the eighteenth, and two the nineteenth. The topics are equally various. The editors have grouped the chapters thematically into four sections, a device that works better for some contributions than for others: "la littérarité des textes médicaux," "maladies (et mort) des gens de lettres," "doctrines médicales et textualité," and "mises en récit de la maladie."

The first section deals with physicians as writers. Andrea Carlino analyzes medical humanism in sixteenth-century Padua, with a focus on Vesalius and the text of De humani corporis fabrica, and Thomas Hunkeler studies the career and writings of Symphorien Champier, a physician and prolific writer in sixteenth-century Lyon with an interest in Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy. A paper by Hugues Marchal deals with La Lucinade, a long didactic poem by the Paris accoucheur Jean-François Sacombe Lucina was the Roman goddess of childbirth). A fierce critic of Cæsarean sections, [End Page 277] Sacombe lacked support among the medical elite and turned to the public for recognition. The edition published in 1792 attacked the "doctoral aristocracy" among other enemies of the Revolution (72).

The second section addresses a long-established theme in studies of medicine and literature, the diseases of writers. It includes papers on Rousseau (by Anne Vila) and Giacomo Leopardi (by Maria Conforti), which examine both the writers' own reflections on their illnesses and the "pathographies" written about them. Dinah Ribard takes a different tack in "Pathologies intellectuelles et littérarisation de la médecine," comparing eighteenth-century texts on charitable medicine and on the illnesses of les gens de lettres, with a focus on the writings of Samuel-Auguste Tissot. She emphasizes the way in which the authors considered intellectual activity as one form of work, with its distinctive occupational diseases.

The section on medical doctrines includes two papers on eighteenth-century materialism, both of which give close attention to Diderot's Le Rêve de d'Alembert, though from different perspectives. Ann Thomson's study of medicine and materialism deals with the appropriation of medical theories by materialistic thinkers such as La Mettrie and Diderot. Caroline Jacot Grapa's analysis of Diderot's image of the seat of sensation in the brain as a spider at the center of her web is the starting point for a wider exploration of the spider motif, the mind-body question, and the use of metaphor in medical discourse, among other themes.

The richest paper, both in this section and in the entire collection, is also the only one that deals with nineteenth-century France. It concerns not medical doctrine but rather a term and concept as they were employed in multiple discourses on science, society, and the human body. The title of Juan Rigoli's "Le 'Roman de la médecine'" comes from an old derisive expression for physiology. Nineteenth-century practitioners of experimental physiology such as François Magendie and Claude Bernard were fond of using it to describe the work of their predecessors, although long before that Molière had one of his characters in Le Malade imaginaire apply it to the explanations that physicians offered for the virtues of their therapies. Rigoli analyzes four kinds of texts: medical works on physiology, both technical and popular; works in which "physiology" is used metaphorically in the title, especially the little popular books, profusely illustrated with vignettes, that satirized manners and social types and became a minor literary fad in the early 1840s; in a related but more serious vein, studies of the body social by Henri de Saint-Simon and his disciples...

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