Charles Bovary 'Officier de Santé'

£Strictly-speak­ing, madame Bo­vary’s hus­band was not a doc­tor, al­though M. Homais, the apothe­cary of Yonville, flat­ters him as such. No, Charles was a hum­ble of­ficier de santé (health of­fi­cer). In the 19th cen­tury, French med­i­cine was split into a dual hi­er­ar­chy that re­flected the di­vi­sion be­tween the bour­geoisie and the com­mon­ers. The of­ficier de santé was a doc­tor of a lower order, who had stud­ied med­i­cine with­out pass­ing the final ex­am­i­na­tions, and who could only prac­tice in a lim­ited way in the départe­ment (ad­min­is­tra­tive re­gion) in which he had qual­i­fied. They were semi-doc­tors who were not al­lowed to per­form im­por­tant surgery with­out the su­per­vi­sion of a real doc­tor. This fact will be rel­e­vant in the pro­fes­sional bi­og­ra­phy of M. Bo­vary. Gus­tave Flaubert knew these cir­cum­stances well, as his fa­ther and brother were pres­ti­gious sur­geons in Rouen. On the two oc­ca­sions in which he shows us Charles Bo­vary in sit­u­a­tions that ex­ceed his pro­fes­sional lim­i­ta­tions, he has to re­sort to cel­e­brated doc­tors from the cap­i­tal. The lat­ter is when he dis­cov­ers his wife, Emma, has poi­soned her­self with ar­senic.

Charles was far from being a bril­liant stu­dent: “ridicu­lus sum” (I am ridicu­lous, in Latin) was the line he was forced to copy out over and again by his teacher on his first day of school. At the med­ical fac­ulty, he showed he had a good mem­ory, but he un­der­stood noth­ing. Yet, that was not to the detri­ment of his vo­ca­tion or his good in­ten­tions. He was cap­ti­vated by Emma’s eyes, eyes that would later cap­ti­vate other men: “dark eyes that seemed black”, “black in the shade and dark blue in the day­light”. In Flaubert’s Par­rot, Ju­lian Barnes scolds the crit­ics who take the won­der­ful nov­el­ist to task for chang­ing the colour of his heroin’s eyes from brown, to blue or black. In truth, what is the im­por­tance of such a tri­fling de­tail? Once mar­ried, Charles’ work was tough: “Charles in snow and rain trot­ted across coun­try. He ate omelettes on farm­house ta­bles, poked his arm into damp beds, re­ceived the tepid spurt of blood-let­tings in his face, lis­tened to death-rat­tles, ex­am­ined basins, turned over a good deal of dirty linen.” Charles lim­ited him­self to pre­scrib­ing seda­tives, oc­ca­sional emet­ics, foot­baths, or leeches. And, it must be said, he worked with dirty fin­ger nails and a three-day beard. He re­ceived a phrenol­ogy bust as a gift to dec­o­rate his surgery, but he was not a real doc­tor.

And here we come to his great fail­ure at surgery that fed his great­est fears. It was an error that came from an ex­cess of am­bi­tion that su­perceded his knowl­edge. It is the op­er­a­tion on Hip­polyte, the crip­pled ser­vant at the inn in Yonville. Under pres­sure from Emma and Homais, Charles at­tempts to op­er­ate on Hip­polyte’s club foot. The au­thor tells us that not even the great Am­broise Paré tying up an artery for the first time, or the em­i­nent Guil­laume Dupuytren’s first treat­ment of a brain ab­scess were as ner­vous as Charles Bo­vary with the scalpel in his hand.

The op­er­a­tion is a dis­as­ter, the wound be­comes gan­grenous and Hip­polyte has his foot am­pu­tated by Dr Canivet from Neufchâtel, who is scorn­ful but ef­fi­cient. Emma gifts the ser­vant a false leg, but there­after a re­morse­ful Charles avoids Hip­polyte. The sad med­ical bi­og­ra­phy of M. Bo­vary is nar­rated in Flaubert’s pre­cise, well-worked style, which avoids flam­boy­ance that might de­tract from re­al­ity, with no con­ces­sions to opin­ion or per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence, say the ex­perts. With an ex­cep­tion, I’d say: the recog­ni­tion of his doc­tor fa­ther and brother. While veiled, the nov­el­ist pays trib­ute to them in the fig­ure of Dr. Lar­ivière, who ap­pears dur­ing Emma’s final mo­ments: “the ap­pari­tion of god could not have caused more ex­cite­ment.” This physi­cian is from M. F. Xavier Bichat’s great school of surgery: “that gen­er­a­tion, now dis­ap­peared, of philo­soph­i­cal prac­ti­tion­ers who, cher­ish­ing their art with a fa­nat­i­cal love, ex­er­cised it with a pas­sion and wis­dom!...Scorn­ing medals, ti­tles and acad­e­mies –hos­pitable, gen­er­ous, fa­therly with the poor and prac­tis­ing virtue with­out be­liev­ing in it... His gaze, more in­ci­sive than his scalpels, would pen­e­trate right into your soul, right through every pre­ten­sion and every ret­i­cence, and ex­cise every lie hid­ing be­neath.” It is the les­son of med­i­cine hid­den in the tragic pages of Madame Bo­vary.

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