John O'Hara, Gustave Flaubert, Writers 'trained' in medecine, Republican Herald

Writers 'trained' in medicine
Published: March 27, 2011


Good doctors and good writers have a lot in common. They share keen powers of observation, the ability to size up a person on the spot, and the knowledge that suffering and death are ingredients of everyday life. Some good writers are actually doctors. This was the case of the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov, who, in hundreds of short stories, described life as he observed it while making his medical rounds in late 19th century Russia.

Others learn the writer's craft not only in the classroom or in books, but in the sickroom, if they have a father who is a doctor eager to introduce his child to the medical field.

Pottsville's John O'Hara was such a writer, and by the time he was 12, he was already riding at his father's side to medical emergencies which often resulted in loss of life. At a coal train wreck he held a dying man's hand and comforted another who had just had his legs cut off. All in a day's work for the father, and soon a natural part of the life of the son. O'Hara used this material to write one of his finest short stories, "The Doctor's Son," created from firsthand experience of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

Whenever I walk by the O'Hara home at 606 Mahantongo St., I look up at the three stories and try to imagine life inside when O'Hara was a boy, the eldest of eight children. His father's office was closer to Centre Street, at 125 Mahantongo St., but the doctor was often called out in the night to all parts of the county, back in the days when house calls were a regular part of a doctor's routine. In "The Doctor's Son," O'Hara describes an exhausted father returning home at 4 a.m. after three days of nonstop emergency calls at the height of the influenza epidemic. He plops down on the sofa and falls asleep till the rest of the family get up for breakfast. In such a household, based on O'Hara's own, there is no separation between work and home.

Recently, I was able to enter the childhood home of one of France's greatest writers, the novelist Gustave Flaubert, author of "Madame Bovary." His father, like O'Hara's, was a doctor, the surgeon general of the main hospital of the city of Rouen in Normandy, and he and his family inhabited a large brick house attached to the medical complex. His father was also a professor of medicine, and the medical school was part of the same hospital.

Dissections or surgical operations took place in large amphitheatres while row after row of students looked on. In his 1889 painting "The Agnew Clinic," on display at University of Pennsylvania and on the Internet, Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins created a vivid picture of what this was like. Students wearing suit and tie lean forward to get a better view of a woman undergoing a public mastectomy while a doctor administers anesthesia, not yet available in Flaubert's father's day.

Flaubert himself was born at home on Dec. 12, 1821, right next door to the hospital. Of his early years he writes, "I grew up among every form of human misery, separated from it by a wall. My playground was the amphitheatre where my father taught." For "a quarter of a century," the hospital was a part of his daily life, leaving an indelible mark on the man and his work.

In what is his best known novel, "Madame Bovary," the story of a tragically unhappy marriage, Emma Bovary's husband is a health officer, a member of an intermediary medical corps created by Napoleon in 1808 and dissolved in 1892. Not quite a doctor, restricted to practicing medicine in the region where he is trained, the health officer sets up shop in the countryside or a small village, whereas doctors and surgeons have their practice near hospitals in the city. Charles, Emma's husband, knows how to set a broken bone or bleed a patient, but when faced with a complicated surgery that goes wrong, he is required by law to call for help from a city surgeon. In Charles' case, he is publicly shamed.

Besides being a great novel, "Madame Bovary" is a compendium of 19th century medical lore. This includes Charles' medical studies in Rouen, in the same medical school where Flaubert's father taught, country medicine as practiced by Charles and the cures and concoctions of the local pharmacist for whom the health officer was a rival. There is also a place for quack cures and their very dangerous consequences.

Flaubert's childhood home, which today is a museum devoted to the writer and his medicine, allows visitors to see how the family of an important doctor and surgeon lived during the first half of the 19th century. Flaubert's father died in 1846, the same year as Flaubert's beloved sister, Caroline. Her death, caused by puerperal fever, was directly linked to the poor hygiene of the doctor who delivered her child. At about the same time, in the United States, Oliver Wendell Holmes was advancing the theory that the fever was spread by doctors and nurses who did not wash their hands, an outrageous statement to many of his contemporaries.

After working long hours in the hospital, Flaubert's father liked to relax by playing a game of billiards and the house had a large billiard room. Today it holds a collection of objects that speak much louder than words about a hospital stay in the early 19th century.

For example, there is a wide hospital bed covered with a down comforter. It actually looked pretty comfortable to me until I discovered it was meant to hold six patients at a time! And each one had his own chamber pot stowed underneath. For those considered "mad," there were heavy iron cuffs for hands and ankles, attached to chains fastened to the walls.

Yet, there was also progress, as this museum attests. In its collections, there is the only remaining mannequin, known as "la Machine," created by an 18th century midwife, Madame du Coudray, to teach other midwives and doctors how to deliver a baby. "La Machine" looks more like a life-sized rag doll, except it can be taken apart to reveal a womb and a rag-doll fetus connected to an umbilical chord. Remarkable for its anatomical accuracy, Madame du Coudray's "machine" traveled with her all over France, where almost single-handedly she trained an entire generation of midwives in the art of childbirth.

Neither O'Hara nor Flaubert followed his father's calling, but without a doubt, their early experiences of medicine played an important role in making them the world-class writers we read and love today.

(Honicker can be reached at honicker.republicanherald@gmail.com)