[Lung diseases and miscellaneous pathologies in the novels of François Mauriac and Pierre Benoit].

Abstract

Two modern novelists of the 20th century native from the Landes, François Mauriac (1885-1970) and Pierre Benoit (1886-1962), were eager to locate a part of their novels in the French South-West. Beyond the silence and the torrid warmth of this "sand desert populated by pine trees", each of them make live, suffer and die their sick heroes from diseases treated with therapies of that time with the risk of voluntary or not drug misuse : tuberculosis, cardiac insufficiency, angina pectoris, puerperal and typhoid fevers and other diseases.