In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

75 3 The Cult of Pathology An Introduction to Selections from Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris Eugène Sue (1804–1857), though hardly read and little known today, was in his own time a highly popular writer. His most famous work, Les Mystères de Paris (1844), is an extremely long novel with a large cast of characters and a complicated plot. When it was first published in serial form in the magazine Débats between June 1842 and October 1843, it was deemed by critics “one of the most important events in French life.” It was adapted for the theater in 1844 and again in 1889, but has been translated into English only in an abbreviated, truncated version. Sue came from a family distinguished in the medical profession for four generations; it comprised fourteen surgeons, five professors, and five members of the French Academy. Although he himself resisted the pressure to become a doctor, he was for a time apprenticed to his father, and spent two further years working in hospitals so that he could draw on intimate, personal experience for the portrayal of the hospital scenes in his novel. In a lengthy footnote (suppressed in the English translation), appended to the opening of Part 9, chapter 6, Sue makes a kind of apologia for the very negative image he gives of medical practice in hospitals. The illustrious work of his father, grandfather, great-uncle, and greatgrandfather , whose name he has the honor to bear, prohibits him, he maintains, from attacking or denigrating the medical profession. This 76 The Cult of Pathology disclaimer serves merely to heighten the gravity of Sue’s indictment of the fictional Dr. Griffon as he parades through his ward with his entourage. The hospital is a place of death, not of healing. Sue evokes its fetid atmosphere, the gloom and sense of doom that engulf all who enter it. As its barred windows suggest, it is like a prison for those who submit to its rules because they have no alternative, no one to care for them at home, and no more strength to sustain themselves. Through his familiarity with hospitals, Sue is able not only to describe the physical environment and the routines but as narrator also to draw us in by invoking readers, making us, as it were, spectators and vicarious participants in the series of dramas being enacted: the death of a nameless patient in the first selection “Death in the Hospital,” the extensive examination of Jeanne Duport, and the doctor’s pleasure at coming upon a rare disease in a new patient, Claire Fremont (in the third selection, “Rounds”). The central and dominant figure throughout these scenes is that of the doctor in charge, Dr. Griffon in the second selection, “Dr. Griffon.” His name itself already implies his predatory nature: a griffin is in ornithology a bird of prey, a type of vulture, and in mythology an animal with the body of a lion and an eagle’s head and wings. This doctor devours his patients, and he does so with undisguised relish for the sake of science. He is called a “prince of science,” a complimentary designation given to leading nineteenth-century French physicians, but in his case the phrase has a distinctly derisive ring because his behavior, while perhaps princely in its imperiousness, is wholly lacking in nobility. On his rounds he is followed by a throng of assistants and students described as his “scientific cortege.” “Cortege,” too, is an ambiguous word that can refer in its celebratory sense to the retinue of an eminent personage, yet that carries too a darker resonance through its association with a funeral procession. As the committed advocate of pathological anatomy, Dr. Griffon appears as the angel of death. He is, as it were, possessed by an obsession with experimentation, using his indigent hospital patients to try out a variety of dangerous drugs, such as iodine, strychnine, arsenic, and phosphorous to combat fever. Even his assistants are astonished at his heedless readiness to take risks. Those therapies that prove successful he will subsequently apply to his paying clientele. From a purely scientific point of view his methods are the proper ones: he conducts controlled experiments by treating one group of patients in a certain innovative way, others by the old method, and leaving a third group untreated so as to be able to compare the outcome. A telling image is applied to Dr. Griffon when...

Share