French Studies and the Medical Humanities

Extract

Introduction

Medicine has always played a prominent role in French culture. From Rabelais to Molière, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Malraux to David B., encounters with the medical profession are omnipresent in French literary texts across genres and centuries. Given that the Paris School of Medicine was long considered the centre of the medical world,¹ the porosity of the medico-literary is perhaps least surprising in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the work of pioneering physicians such as Marie-François-Xavier Bichat and René Laennec and chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur laid some of the foundations for modern medicine. While the blurring of C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ is already apparent in these antecedents, what has come to be known as the interdisciplinary field of the medical humanities has its origins in the mid-twentieth century. Early usage of the term is associated with the historian of science George Sarton who, as far back as 1924, advocated for what he called a ‘humanization of science’;² he thereby built on an idea already voiced by the Canadian physician William Osler, who had referred to the humanities as the ‘hormones’ of the medical profession earlier in the century.³ That the denomination of this field, which has come to play a significant role in French studies in the last ten years and which is the focus of this état présent, was conceived in the medico-scientific realm is important. This is because its original goal to make medicine — through the humanities — more humane has long dominated the field. The stronghold of this idea needs to be understood in the context of the rise of bioethics after the Second World War with the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Geneva seeking to protect patients’ rights and restrict the power of medical professionals.⁴ Later in the century, the field’s marked focus on patient narratives can also be interpreted as a response to the growing influence of evidence-based medicine.⁵ Equally important is the linguistic and cultural point of origin of the field that French studies has been mediating, as what has come to be known as first-wave medical humanities was first and foremost a pedagogical endeavour conceived in the English-speaking world. This état présent charts the development of medical humanities in French-language cultural and critical contexts, both within France and the discipline of French studies, assessing its particular contours, complexities, and points of inflection against the landscape of the field more globally.