Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This work analyses the representation of the doctor–patient relationship in the nineteenth-century French novel. It argues that the doctor–patient relationship is a site of interpersonal negotiation rather than a site of the imposition of an anachronistically ‘scientific’ vision of medicine. It finds that the medical relationship is frequently idealized by the novel, but it illustrates how the doctor–patient encounter resists this idealization. It presents the doctor–patient encounter as a separate, although inherently related, concept that often undermines the doctor–patient relationship and questions the fundamental tenets of medical practice, knowledge, and authority. The book identifies and explores other important themes within the doctor–patient relationship such as the medical gaze (regard médical), power relationships, the construction and destruction of medical plots, and the use of embodied metaphor. A central concern is how these key themes intersect with the representation of gender and disability. The work uses a conceptual framework developed from the critical medical humanities to re-interpret and revitalize the meaning of the doctor–patient relationship. The work also contextualizes nineteenth-century novels in their historical background using contemporaneous medical texts. Authors central to this work’s analysis are Balzac, Sand, Stendhal, and Zola, and it offers new readings of these writers’ novels that have not previously been considered as engaged with medicine and/or illness. The work also draws on a wide range of historical material to contextualize its analysis, illustrating the permeable boundary between medical and literary writing in the nineteenth century.</jats:p>