Semmelweis
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Semmelweis
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1924 medical thesis — a literary account of the Hungarian physician who discovered that doctors were killing their own patients.
Read our takeSemmelweis et autres écrits médicaux
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Semmelweis et autres écrits médicaux
Gallimard's Cahiers Céline 3 — the collected medical corpus of Dr. Louis Destouches, before he became Céline: the 1924 Semmelweis thesis and the public-health and factory-medicine writings that surrounded it.
- 1977
About Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeBefore he was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Louis Destouches was a physician who wrote extensively about medicine, public health, industrial organisation and social insurance. Gallimard's Cahiers Céline 3, edited by Jean-Pierre Dauphin and Henri Godard, gathers this pre-literary corpus: the 1924 Semmelweis thesis at the centre, the 1925 quinine monograph, the 1928 essay on the Ford factories in Detroit, the League of Nations reports, and the shorter public-health pieces that ran in medical journals through the 1920s and 1930s. Read together, they form a coherent body of work rather than the isolated curiosities they can look like when encountered separately. An appendix collects letters to the League of Nations; a bibliography and index close the volume.
Why we recommend it
The corpus in one book
Reading the medical writings scattered across journals and archives is a scholar's job. Cahiers Céline 3 is the book that put them between two covers, and it is the way most readers meet the pre-literary Céline.
The doctor before the novelist
The clinical attention of the novels — the ear for pain, complaint and evasion — is not a metaphor. It is what Destouches actually did for a living, and the writings gathered here are the record of the mind that later wrote Bardamu.
What this book explores
Book editions
Paperback
- Paperback
- Éditions Gallimard (Cahiers Céline vol. 3)
Reader reviews
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La Médecine chez Ford
Dr. Louis Destouches's medical essay on the Ford factories in Detroit — a physician's report on what mass production does to the human body and what factory medicine is actually for.
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline
On a les maîtres qu'on mérite
The 1924 philosophical opening Louis Destouches wrote for La Vie, Pasteur, Semmelweis et la Mort — cut by La Presse médicale, lost to the League of Nations archive in Geneva, and rediscovered in 2014.
Read our takeIf you like Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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Miller read Journey in manuscript while writing Tropic of Cancer and never recovered — the two books are the era's twin gutter-testaments.
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The same war, the same refusal of the big words — delivered in whispers where Céline delivers it in screams. Both writers died in the same week of July 1961.
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