"A la frontière de deux mondes": Spatial Perspectives on Mortality in Modern Physician Thanatographies
2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/esp.2021.0004
ISSN1931-0234
Autores Tópico(s)History of Medicine Studies
Resumo"A la frontière de deux mondes":Spatial Perspectives on Mortality in Modern Physician Thanatographies Steven Wilson IN A RECENTLY PUBLISHED SERIES of témoignages on death by leading French artists and personnalités, Jean-Christophe Rufin, a clinician, writer, and one-time French ambassador to Senegal, declares that "La mort est consubstantielle à mon métier. On est en contact avec les cadavres. […] On s'habitue."1 Rufin's point—made in the reference to contact with "les cadavres" rather than "les corps," still less "les patients"—is that clinicians who work in modern medicine have become desensitized to death. This suggestion is reinforced by consultant gastroenterologist Seamus O'Mahony in his reflection on Western attitudes to mortality. With specific reference to what he terms the "immunity" of the medical profession, O'Mahony writes, "although we see it every day, doctors do not think very much about death and dying."2 Rufin and O'Mahony, in their observations, remind us that the distinctive roles allocated to "doctor" and "patient" in modern medicine ensure that clear subjectivities are enforced to each. Professional barriers must be maintained, not least as a protective measure to ensure the doctor's emotional protection and wellbeing. "Le rôle du médecin," Pascal Hammel, of Paris's Hôpital Beaujon, reminds us, "est d'accompagner la souffrance avec empathie, en gardant une distance."3 But what happens when this clearly defined "role" is challenged by the onset of a serious illness? What shifts in power, status, and subjectivity occur when the doctor becomes the patient and is forced to confront his or her own mortality? And what do physician accounts of dying, written from a rare perspective, reveal about our common inexorable destiny? There is a rich French tradition of those with a medical background turning their attention to the writing of literature: dating back to Rabelais, more modern examples of such trajectories include Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Prix Goncourt laureate Georges Duhamel. The 2018 volume Médecins-écrivains français et francophones is the most extensive study to date on doctors who exchange surgical instruments for the pen, and focuses on four themes related to medical and scientific influence in French physician writing: "les motivations, les transferts, les contaminations et les confrontations interculturelles."4 Unlike the essays contained in Pröll, Lüsebrink, and Madry's book, this article [End Page 54] turns its attention to the introspective gaze of doctors who pick up the pen in order to articulate their perspective on dying and death. As Anne Carol has noted in her extensive study of "Les médecins et la mort," we have witnessed a process whereby, since the nineteenth century, "le médecin interv[ient] de plus en plus souvent autour du mourant, du mourir et du mort."5 Yet the present article considers the insights afforded by doctors who do not merely "intervenir […] autour du mourant," but become the "mourant," contemplating and writing about dying from the very the hospital bed from which they had sought to distance themselves all their professional lives. In the context of the contemporary upsurge of interest in this subject, especially in the anglophone world through best-selling memoirs such as Paul Kalanithi's 2016 When Breath Becomes Air, this article examines what the language used in French physician memoirs contributes to our conceptualization, articulation, and understanding of dying and death. It turns to one of the first narratives penned by a doctor-turned-patient during the period that witnessed the "medicalization of death," by René Allendy, who is given only the briefest of references in Médecins-écrivains français et francophones. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the spatial perspectives, and specifically the language of thresholds, used by the physician-turned-pathographer to relate his medical experience, contemplation of death, and change in identity from doctor to patient-writer. It will do so by offering a reading of Allendy's text alongside an autopathography by Hammel, a physician who survived a cancer diagnosis, and in conjunction with Kalanithi's text. In this way, the aim of this study is two-fold: to develop recent consideration of the connections between place, space, and...
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