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

1. Madame Bovary's Blind Beggar: A Medical Reading

1 Madame Bovary ’s Blind Beggar A Medical Reading
There is no caste that I despise as much as the medical, I who come from a family of physicians from father to son, including cousins (since I’m the only Flaubert who is not a doctor). But when I speak of my disdain for the caste, I make an exception of my dad. Gustave Flaubert Flaubert’s contemptuous comment about the medical profession, made at one of the famous “Magny dinners” and duly reported by the Goncourt brothers in their journal, may appear somewhat incongruous in view of the extent to which he drew upon medical knowledge in the creation of his characters and their stories. Yet there exists a relationship between his cynicism and his enthrallment, his condescension toward the medical practitioner and his respect for medical science. Although any one of his novels or stories could be used to stake out the parameters of his ambivalence the unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet offers a particularly rich source of medical allusions scholars interested in what Lawrence Rothfield terms Flaubert’s “medicalized realism” have typically turned to Madame Bovary. Rothfield, taking issue with Michael Riffaterre’s reading of Emma’s hysteria, contends that, in order to understand fully Flaubert’s text, a knowledge of contemporary ideological presuppositions is insufficient and that a more technical understanding is required, specifically a familiarity with the discursive assumptions of medical science.1 Rothfield illustrates the use to which such madame bovary ’s blind beggar 23 understanding can be put by studying the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales and other early-nineteenth-century medical essays, most notably those authored by Xavier Bichat. Madame Bovary itself suggests a study of these sources, since the novel alludes both to the medical dictionary and to the celebrated pathological anatomist, the former a symbol of Charles Bovary’s relative ignorance, since its pages are uncut, the latter associated with the single competent representative of the medical profession mentioned in the novel, Dr. Larivière. Rothfield’s Bichatian reading of Emma’s hysteria leads him to postulate that Flaubert has projected his own distressing medical experiences onto his heroine, based upon the anatomist’s contention that hysteria and epilepsy were gendered variants of the same disease. Rothfield concludes that Flaubert’s motives in making extensive use of medical discourse in his novel are both biographical and sociological biographical because Flaubert shared Larivière’s medical knowledge as well as Emma’s symptoms, sociological because the incorporation of medical assumptions allowed him to affiliate himself with a rising professional class “for whom technical skill rather than ideological purity or personal authority [was] fast becoming the relevant measure of value.”2 Rothfield’s approach has much to recommend it, and although I do not believe that the passage describing Larivière’s eleventh-hour appearance at Emma’s bedside succeeds in mitigating the novel’s unremitting pessimism with regard to nineteenthcentury medical practice, my own analysis of the novel from a medical perspective makes use of many of the same reading strategies. Medical readings of Flaubert’s famous novel are not in short supply.3 Nor are studies focusing on the function and symbolism of the blind beggar.4 Oddly enough, however, the graphic details of the beggar’s condition and the peculiarities of Homais’s suggested therapies have never come under close scrutiny, despite the plethora of attention accorded to the novel’s other medically inspired descriptions (Emma’s hysteria, her poisoning, the clubfoot operation). Yet scholars have clearly been troubled by the grotesque nature of the beggar’s malady, and William Paulson goes so far as to suggest that we cannot piece together the seemingly disparate elements in the description unless we place it in the context of “prior discursive and textual treatment of the blind.”5 24 madame bovary ’s blind beggar Flaubert, clearly, had departed from the tradition that equated loss of sight with wisdom, a tradition that in the nineteenth century produced such inspirational figures as Chateaubriand’s Chactas. Nevertheless, most critics agree that Emma’s encounter with this hideous figure is a “recognition scene” of sorts and is associated with insight. Variously interpreted as a symbol for reality, the devil, nemesis, conscience, “the hound of fate,” or love in a bourgeois culture, the beggar is routinely reduced to his two most salient characteristics: his...