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

Notes

Notes
Introduction 1 Illich, Medical Nemesis, 11. 2 Illich, Medical Nemesis, 18. 3 Illich, Medical Nemesis, 26. 4 Canby, review of The Apple Doesn’t Fall. 5 T. Bernard, Sous toutes réserves, 546–48. 6 T. Bernard, Sous toutes réserves, 548. 7 Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma, v. 8 Danous, Le Corps souffrant, 185. 9 Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, 1:495–557. 10 See Foucault, Naissance de la clinique. For an excellent summary of the principal medical advances of nineteenth-century France, see also Furst, “Realism and Hypertrophy.” 11 The new attitude toward the patient is articulated in disturbing terms in Charles Bell Keatley’s The Student’s and Junior Practitioner’s Guide to the Medical Profession (London 1885). Outlining the rich resources of the teaching hospital, Keatley writes: “The clinical material is simply overflowing . . . and there is any amount of opportunity for men to work clinically at dresserships and clerkships, if they will only come and finger the material for themselves. It is a perfect paradise for every kind of tumour known, and the accidents are numerous” (quoted by Waddington, The Medical Profession, 223–24). Although the example comes from England, a similar shift in attitude took place in France. 12 Although, as Yvonne Knibiehler and Catherine Fouquet note in La Femme et les médecins, nuns practiced medicine throughout much of the nineteenth century, sometimes with the complicity of the government, laws which they ignored with impunity were passed to limit their jurisdiction. Moreover, physicians deplored 202 notes to pages 9–12 their insistence on the pathogenic influence of sin and their promotion of pilgrimages , processions, novenas, prayers to “mediator-saints,” etc., and, as Jacques Léonard points out, “large battalions of nuns were in the front ranks of the medical corps’ illegal rivals” (La Médecine 70). 13 See Ramsey, “Medical Power and Popular Medicine.” 14 Physicians had run for public office in earlier periods as well, and Bianchon’s sarcastic comment in Balzac’s La Muse du département, “Only doctors without patients can get themselves named deputies” (Balzac, La Comédie humaine, 4:702), represents a typical attitude toward the phenomenon. During the Third Republic, whenthepracticereachedstunning proportions,thewriters’ cynicism escalated.See Maupassant’s “Un coup d’état,” in Contes et nouvelles, 1:1004; and “Va t’asseoir!” in Chroniques, 1:274–80. My article “Doctoring History” analyzes the representation of the medico-politician. On the rise of the physician in politics, see Ellis, The Physician-legislators. 15 Lhermite, Un sceptique s’il vous plaît, 28. 16 I use the masculine pronoun deliberately. Although the Paris medical faculty graduated its first French woman in 1875, medicine was by and large a masculine profession throughout the nineteenth century, and according to Knibiehler and Fouquet, there was much literature in the medical press of the second half of the nineteenth century that decried the accession of women to the profession. 17 Indeed, as Vivian Kogan points out in “Michelet Plays Doctor,” the comparison of the state with the human body goes all the way back to Plato. 18 See Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics. 19 See J. Léonard, La France médicale. 20 See Hunter, Doctors’ Stories. Gillian Beer, in “Plot and the analogy with science,” also shows how scientists drew on literary sources in support of their arguments. 21 Goldstein, “The Uses of Male Hysteria.” 22 From Jules Michelet (1858), quoted by J. Léonard, La Médecine, 260. For more on Michelet’s somewhat complex relationship to medicine, see Kogan, “Michelet Plays Doctor.” 23 Quoted by J. Léonard, La France médicale, 251. 24 This self-importance is somewhat diminished by 1927, when the physician Maurice de Fleury writes: “With the opportunities that we would have to do evil it’s a profession that lends itself to everything let’s be proud that we don’t have more ugly incidents” (Le Médecin 15). 25 Rideout, “The Medical Practitioner,” 7. 26 See Furst, “Realism and Hypertrophy,” for a more nuanced reading of fictional representations of medical practitioners. 27 See Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir and L’Ordre du discours. 28 See Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse. notes to pages 12–24 203 29 Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy, xi, 2. 30 Cabanès, Le Corps et la maladie. 31 See Rothfield, Vital Signs. 32 Rothfield, Vital Signs, xiv. 33 Rothfield, Vital Signs, xvi...