Doctoring the Script: Crime Writing, Order and Medical Authority in the Oeuvre of Dr Augustin Cabanès, 1894–1928

Abstract

Summary In 1894, Augustin Cabanès founded La Chronique médicale, a one-of-a-kind medical journal that allowed the doctor to indulge his interest in the practise of médecin historique. Historical medicine used modern forensic knowledge to ‘solve’ the mysterious deaths of history. Such retrospective diagnoses were communicated to readers in a familiar literary style, that of crime writing. Developed at the intersection of medical professionalisation and specialisation, the rise of forensic medicine, and the popularisation of crime writing, Cabanès’s work promoted a clear viewpoint on the role of the medical man in fin-de-siècle French society. Through the practise of historical medicine and the medium of crime writing, Cabanès aimed to bolster faith in forensic medicine, to promote the doctor as moral authority, and, relatedly, to establish scientific, and especially medical, practise as critical to the maintenance of the social order during volatile periods of social dislocation and war.