Bernard, Bouvard and Pécuchet

Abstract

During the 19th century, which History remembers as the “Century of Scholars,” medical-scientific triumph flourishes. Following the words of famous French physiologist Claude Bernard, who wrote in his Introduction to experimental medicine that “medicine is heading towards its definite scientific path” (BENARD, 1865, p. 6, my translation), physicians and their apprentices abandon the bookish authority of medical treatises and the hazards of their subjective intuition, to invest – for good? – the rigor of scientific objectivity. Yet, the trials of reality bring with them their lot of ambivalence and contradiction, hinting that the “anatomical-clinical conversion” Bernard promotes may not be as “definite” as he hoped. This article will shed light on the paradoxical medical and literary (re)conversions that took place in the 19th century, through the medical chapter of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, published posthumously in 1881. It will also contrast the history of medicine as described by French surgeon Jean-Charles Sournia, and the medical-experimental perspective of Claude Bernard, a contemporary of Flaubert and his passionate copyists.