Littérature et médecine: Approches et perspectives (XVI–XIX siècle) (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Littérature et médecine: Approches et perspectives (XVI–XIX siècle) Andrea Goulet Andrea Carlino and Alexandre Wenger, eds. Littérature et médecine: Approches et perspectives (XVI–XIX siècle). Recherches et Rencontres, no. 24. Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de Genève. Geneva: Droz, 2007. 288 pp. (paperbound, 978-2-600-01146-4). In the cover illustration of this interdisciplinary collection, a skeleton pulls itself up to a stone bookshelf in order to read an open volume. The oddly affecting image, taken from an eighteenth-century French anatomical treatise, effectively links the human body to books in the bony form of a posthumous bibliophile. Thus, with a wink, editors Carlino and Wenger thematize the enduring interconnectedness of medicine and literature. Moving beyond the unidirectional influence model, they succeed in presenting—through their commentary, their choice of top-notch essays, and the book's very organization—literary and scientific discourse as rich mutual resources. The volume grew out of a colloquium held in Geneva in the fall of 2005 in which presenters were asked to reflect on their theoretical approaches to scientific history, medical knowledge, literary discourse, and interdisciplinary practice in general. The result is an exceptionally fruitful set of essays that combine deep erudition—on topics ranging from Vesalius's rhetorical devices in 1540 Padua to the tropes of vitalism and physiology in nineteenth-century France—with broader methodological discussion. The book's usefulness thus extends beyond disciplinary or chronological divisions and will, I hope, reach a wide audience. Nine of the thirteen essays are written in French, and four are in English. Carlino and Wenger divide their volume into four parts, each of which emphasizes methodological rather than thematic links. The first, "La littérarité des textes médicaux" [The Literariness of Medical Texts] treats the writings of doctors as worthy of semantic analysis and attention to rhetorical strategies. Each of the three essays in this section traces the epistemic associations of particular tropes: Andrea Carlino embeds Vesalius's fabrica within the context of "medical humanism" in Renaissance Italy; Thomas Hunkeler studies the question of Ficino's influence on the use of "compilation" by the sixteenth-century French doctor Symphorien Champier; and Hugues Marchal examines poetic form and polemics in the Luciniade by Jean-François Sacombe, a Parisian obstetrician writing in the 1790s against caesarean-section deliveries. Lest these topics seem dry, let me quote one of Marchal's citations from Sacombe, in which the poet-doctor derides a British surgeon's theory on interspecies generation: "Suivant lui, toute espèce et se croise et se mêle;/ Un coq peut féconder une carpe femelle,/ La sole une grenouille, et l'huître un moucheron." [According to him, every species crosses and mixes/ A rooster can fertilize a female carp,/ the sole [can inseminate] a frog, and the oyster a fly] (p. 76). The theme of cross-pollination continues at the metadisciplinary level in the volume's second section, entitled "Maladies (et mort) des gens des lettres" [Illness (and death) in men of letters], which studies physical and psychological pathologies in humanists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Giacomo Leopardi. Since many likely readers of this collection are ourselves humanists, we might join alarm to [End Page 781] amusement at Anne Vila's discussion of hypochondria, melancholy, and "poetic vapors" in French Enlightenment thinkers; Dinah Ribard's evocation of Tissot's admonition to schoolteachers in 1766 that they learn bleeding methods; and Maria Conforti's study of Leopardi's sufferings from nervous illness, gluttony, and intellectual degeneration. Vila's essay deserves special mention for its smart critical discussion of the unresolved relation between physical bodies and "pure" textuality. The third section, "Doctrines médicales et textualité" [Medical Doctrines and Textuality] provides cogent and nuanced intellectual histories of the body–soul relation in eighteenth-century materialism (Ann Thompson, Caroline Jacot-Grapa) and nineteenth-century physiology ( Juan Rigoli). And the volume's final section, "Mises en récit de la maladie" [Narrativizations of Illness], provides fine fodder for literary hypochondriacs (and serious scholars): Xavier Le Person analyzes sixteenth-century epistolary discourse by nobles on illness (bloodletting and purging for corporeal purity...