Genre Trouble on the Battlefield: Pharmaceutical, Medical, and Literary Accounts of Napoleonic Campaigns

Abstract

The nineteenth century sees a proliferation of medical narratives, made possible at least in part by the same technological developments that enable the wide dissemination of literary narratives. These medical and literary narratives in fact share many stylistic features, in particular their privileging of dispassionate observation. In this sense, the realist novel — the ‘clinical’ aspects of which are frequently highlighted by critics — is, along with the medical treatise containing case studies, the archetype of objective, detached narrative.1 It is thus unsurprising, for example, that an archetype of realist literary discourse such as Madame Bovary should have strongly medical themes, or rather, engage with medical discourse, borrowing from contemporary medical treatises and more generally articulating the discursive development of health professions in the nineteenth century. Flaubert’s novel — this chapter’s key point of canonical literary reference — collapses distinctions between literary and other discourses, including medicine and, notably, pharmacy. At the same time, Madame Bovary practises what might be termed a ‘pharmaceutical’ operation in orchestrating this collapse. While medicine and pharmacy become professionally aligned in the early nineteenth century, pharmacy is distinctive in its representativity of expanding disciplines precisely because of its disciplinarily hybrid nature. Moreover, whereas medical narratives might well be objective, clinical, and dispassionate, pharmaceutical narratives are in many ways reflective of the polyvalency of pharmacy. One of pharmacy’s key professional and discursive concerns is to express that polyvalency.2 A significant context for its expression is an area of nineteenth-century life represented