The Enlightened Physician by Geoffrey Wall

The Enlightened Physician by Geoffrey Wall

Geoffrey Wall's narrative biography of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, the father of the author of Madame Bovary, follows him from his birth in a French provincial town a few years before the Revolution through to his distinguished career as a physician in an industrial city. Growing up under the corrosive anguish of the Terror, he emerged as a talented schoolboy who read Voltaire and imbibed the radical materialism of the 1790s. As an aspiring medical student in Paris, he embraced the new scientific medicine and climbed the ladder of his profession by avoiding military service. As a young doctor animated by humanitarian ideals, he was appointed to run a large hospital in Rouen where too many factory workers were dying young, the most insidious public health problem of the new age. He was to remain there for thirty years. Drawing on archival sources in Paris, Rouen and Sens, the book includes meticulous period details, such as an account of postoperative care in the age before anaesthetics. The author asks what happened to Enlightenment ideals in the age of industry and examines the conflict between science and religion.
This is not only a biography of an eminent nineteenth-century physician but a collective moral history of the Napoleon generation.

Madame Bovary and other works by Gustave Flaubert have been translated by Geoffrey Wall. He lives in York with his wife and four children and works as a teacher at the University of York.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781906165475
ISBN 10	1906165475
Title	The Enlightened Physician
Author	Geoffrey Wall
Series	Peter Lang Ltd
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Peter Lang Ltd
Year published	2013-12-27
Number of pages	220
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.