A Matter of Patient Dignity: Recovering the Textual Woman in the Goncourts’ Germinie Lacerteux

This article reads Jules and Edmond de Goncourt’s Germinie Lacerteux (1864) alongside the history of medicine to develop a concept of recovery—in the medical sense of bringing a patient back to health—that examines the question of patient dignity. The target analysis of recovery uses critical disability studies, as well as poststructuralist and feminist theories, and is divided into two parts: first, on a creative/interpretative level where readers recover characters from the diagnosis of mere symptoms of normative and problematic authors; second, on an analytical/critical level where readers recover characters’ difficult narratives such as that of a patient. I draw out an alternative narrative: one that has been deemed unintelligible by normative systems of inquisition and that is untethered from notions of pathology. The goal is to interject a medical humanities discourse in the debate on how narrative might influence empathy in healthcare providers.