Introduction: connecting medicine and religion in modern French literature
Introduction: connecting medicine and religion in modern French literature
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简介:法国现代文学中医学与宗教的联系
DOI:
10.1080/09639489.2020.1784860
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发表时间:
2020
影响因子:
0.3
通讯作者:
Wilson S
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Wilson S
As a friendship develops between the priest and the doctor, the former declares that, in different ways, they both work ‘pour le salut de l’homme.’Rieux, however, challenges the language used by Paneloux and the ideological assumptions that underpin it, stating:‘Le salut de l’homme est un trop grand mot pour moi. Je ne vais pas si loin. C’est sa santé qui m’intéresse, sa santé d’abord’(Camus 1947, 238). With fear spreading that the epidemic might last indefinitely, the townsfolk of Oran turn increasingly to prophecies, superstitions, religious observances, and ‘[les] diverses prophéties dues à des mages ou à des saints de l’Église catholique’; the town’s journalists even begin to serialise prophetic writings in their newspapers, cashing in, alongside the local printing firms, on ‘cet engouement’and ‘la curiosité du public,’which was by now ‘insatiable’(241). In this way, we are told that ‘la religion du temps de peste ne pouvait être la religion de tous les jours’(245). Disease, then, seemingly modifies religious practice. Even Paneloux, profoundly affected by witnessing the painful death of a child,‘parut changé’(240), though his response to the consequences of the epidemic is to embark on a careful consideration of the relationship between religion and medicine. His second sermon during the epidemic is based on a short essay on which he had been working, entitled ‘Un prêtre peut-il consulter un médecin?’(240). In the sermon, Rieux declares that God’s will must be accepted, even in times of great testing. The young deacon ministering in the church summarises Paneloux’s sermon to Rieux in these words:‘Si un prêtre consulte un médecin, il ya contradiction’(249). Yet, when Paneloux himself falls ill only a few days after his sermon, his faith is tested. Although initially he refuses to see a doctor, eventually ‘Il s’ abandonna comme une chose à tous les traitements qu’on lui imposa, mais il ne lâcha plus le crucifix’(253). Paneloux’s final stance, signalled by a passive ‘abandonment’to medical treatment, all the while clinging to a faith previously articulated in direct opposition to medicine, signals a less dogmatic, more ambiguous, complex relationship between medicine and religion in Camus’s novel. It is precisely such a relationship, located in the literary spaces and places where medicine and religion intersect, engage, and even clash, that prompts a considered analysis in this special issue of Modern and Contemporary France of the ways in which modern French literature has reflected (on) the association of entities that have all too often been treated as distinct categories.Notwithstanding the breadth of religious perspectives on suffering, empathy, end-oflife care, medical ethics, and healing, it remains the case that, as Nathan Carlin sets out in a section on ‘Religion and Health’in a recent introduction to the medical humanities,‘The subject of religion as well as insights from religious studies and theology are underrepresented in medical humanities’(2014, 291). Even when the role of religion in representations of medical practice, experience, or care is considered, it is often framed in opposition to medicine. Such representational paradigms stem from the development of modern medicine in the nineteenth century, which was conceived in opposition to religious practice and values. As Lucy Bending (2000, 4) writes in her study of bodily suffering in the Victorian era, Christianity and medicine offered two ‘dominant though conflicting’paradigms for understanding pain in nineteenth-century Britain. Outre Manche, as Mary Donaldson-Evans (2000, 44) has shown, the Church-supported ‘vitalist’view of health and disease existed in a state of tension with the so-called …
影响因子:
--
作者:
J. Shapiro
通讯作者:
J. Shapiro
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2016
期刊:
影响因子:
--
作者:
Susan M. Felch
通讯作者:
Susan M. Felch
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2007
期刊:
影响因子:
--
作者:
V. Kaufmann
通讯作者:
V. Kaufmann