Essays in French Literature and Culture (Oct 2021)
Zola’s Fortunate Man: Rereading Le Docteur Pascal as a Country Doctor
Abstract
This article rereads Émile Zola’s Le Docteur Pascal (1893) from a critical Medical Humanities perspective to highlight the eponymous doctor’s entanglement with medical practice, thus offering an innovative interpretation of one of Zola’s most maligned novels. Drawing on John Berger’s trope of the country doctor, described in A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967), this article foregrounds, firstly, Pascal’s confrontation with his professional inadequacy; and, secondly, the inequality inherent in the doctor- patient relationship. At the same time as demonstrating the value of applying conceptual approaches derived from the critical Medical Humanities to literary studies, my analysis of the doctor-patient relationship in a rural context is of critical interest to the current development of the Medical Humanities.
