Médecine, sciences de la vie et littérature en France et en Europe de la Révolution à nos jours, I : Herméneutique et clinique; II : L'Âme et le corps réinventés; III : Le Médecin entre savoirs et pouvoirs
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/fs/knw055
ISSN1468-2931
Autores Tópico(s)Health, Medicine and Society
ResumoAs the title indicates, the editors of these three volumes have set themselves an ambitious goal. The articles collected here were generated by the Équipe Traverses 19–21 between 2004 and 2008, and they make for a publication that covers an immense range of topics. Inevitably, the sheer extent of the subject matter entails methodological omissions, as a result of which the seventy-four articles do not always combine persuasively into a coherent whole. The inclusion of the life sciences, for example, even if there are a number of chapters focusing on topics other than medicine, indicates the need for an all-inclusive concept allowing the editors to link together this mass of disparate material. Perhaps the most frustrating oversight is that there is no contextualization of how approaches from the ‘medical humanities’ have understood the tangled relationship between literature and medicine in recent decades. Lise Dumasy-Queffélec proposes in the General Introduction that ‘le rapport médecin/patient comme figure du rapport auteur/lecteur, voir écrivain/corps social est également à étudier, pendant toute la période considérée’ (i, 13), which is a precept so close to this field of research that this should have been acknowledged, particularly since the volumes propose also to look beyond France. About a quarter of the contributions focus on other European (and some non-European) texts and contexts, and ‘literature’ is defined in very open terms (‘poésie, fiction romanesque et théâtrale, et aussi textes d'idées, politiques, scientifiques et philosophiques’, i, 10) that occasionally also allow for chapters on film, visual art, and music. These and other issues of methodological fine-tuning (‘medicine’ is understood in the broadest sense) compromise the overall rigour of the project; however, if consulted selectively, the three volumes are immensely rewarding and offer many fine essays. It helps that each volume is given a distinct title, and the editors have further attempted to narrow down their volume-specific focus with separate introductory chapters. The first volume assesses the image of the physician and questions how medicine produces power structures and forms of interpretation; the second sets out to analyse clashes between materialism and spiritualism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the final volume returns to an analysis of the role of the physician and examines the resulting relationship between medicine and fiction. The three subsections of the first volume (‘Interpréter’; ‘Juger’; ‘Soigner’) consider the ways in which the clinical gaze may be capable of creating entire social pathologies, an example of which Jean-Dominique Goffette sees in Balzac's idea of the ‘Paris monstre’, a social body endangered by degeneracy and death (i, 42), and which, as Gaëlle Le Dref outlines in her examination of theories of social Darwinism and degeneracy, ultimately culminates in anti-humanism. Even if the significance of Foucault is only briefly mentioned (i, 35), a key theme of the volume — the tension between normal and pathological, and the physician as mediator between the two — is masterfully presented in Jean-Jacques Courtine's postscript, which explores the ‘médicalisation du champ du regard’ (i, 413; emphasis in the original) and the fundamental role of the physician in shaping this gaze from 1840 to 1940. In his chapter on Louis-Ferdinand Céline's doctoral thesis on Ignaz Semmelweis, Shane Lillis importantly emphasizes the side effects of that gaze, namely that in accounts of physicians or by physicians, be it in visual art or literature, the patient often disappears behind the disease under examination, which, according to Lillis, is a concern that also shimmers through Voyage au bout de la nuit. The second volume questions the ways in which literature stages the self as processing scientific discoveries and medical progress from the Revolution to the twenty-first century. Ranging from contributions on Diderot to contemporary artists such as Stelarc and Orlan, the volume, as Hélène Spengler notes, is arranged around ‘les grands tournants de l'épistémè’ (ii, 11) that have produced ambivalent relations between literary and scientific discourses and have thereby led to a ‘moi en crise’ (ii, 11). Caroline Warman's comparative chapter examines a Diderotian heritage in Cabanis's Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, laying open remarkable philosophical resemblances regardless of whether Cabanis ever read the Éléments de physiologie. Another highlight of the volume is Mariana Saad's article on how not only the philosophy of vitalism but also readings in ‘la médecine vitaliste’ shaped Balzac's take on marriage in Physiologie du mariage and Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (ii, 71). Given that the volume's purpose is to assess the ambivalent relations between the self and the world, there are a number of contributions focusing on either melancholia or hysteria, or both. These conditions are, as Samuel Lepastier points out with regard to hysteria, always in a dialectical relationship between the somatic and psychological. While Marie-Rose Corredor reads the representation of melancholia from Stendhal to Gautier as rooted in the birth of French psychiatry (Pinel, Esquirol), Doina Constantinescu's perceptive chapter on the interplay between the poetics of melancholia and hysteria in Cioran ultimately points towards a postmodern condition, which unveils ‘l'univers raté d'un moi désagrégé’ (ii, 288). The ‘double mouvement’ of exaltation and loss of confidence caused by the limitations of scientific knowledge is what the final volume sets out to analyse (iii, 9). A first part successfully addresses the ways in which positivism and Darwinism have shaped the social and human sciences (even an article on economics is included) in the course of the nineteenth century. Annie Petit recalls, significantly, that medicine was far from being accepted as a science in the Comtian system, and she thereby confirms Dumasy-Queffélec's introductory remark that ‘la médicine, indissolublement art et science, est par là même le domaine scientifique dont la littérature, réflexion et pratique, peut se sentir le plus proche’ (iii, 18). This concern is also at the heart of the stimulating second part, on the literary representation of physicians, and the final part presenting four biographical studies of physicians. Joël July's reading of the figure of Bruno Sachs in Martin Winckler's œuvre exemplifies how the practice of digression in fiction is a way of bridging the medical background of the author with his identity as a writer. Another essay by Petit ends the volume with the assertion that Émile Littré ‘est un médecin hanté par l'histoire, la philologie et la philosophie. On pourrait aussi bien dire un philosophe habité, hanté par le médecin historien et littérateur, ou un historien hanté par la médecine, la philosophie et la littérature’ (iii, 355). Even if there might have been more room for critical reflection or a more rigorous general methodological framework, this sums up the impression these volumes leave, namely that the practice and cultural role of medicine is deeply intertwined with the social and natural sciences and humanities, and that this is an important and unexhausted area of pluridisciplinary research.
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