Semmelweis et autres écrits médicaux

The volume opens with Céline's 1924 doctoral thesis on Ignaz Semmelweis — the Hungarian physician who discovered that doctors were transmitting the infection killing women in the maternity wards, and who spent the rest of his life fighting a medical establishment unwilling to accept it.

It gathers the shorter medical papers Destouches wrote in the years that followed — including the 1925 monograph on quinine — for medical journals and hospital publications, and often in a plain professional register that reads nothing like the later fiction.

The 1928 Ford factory essay — À propos du service sanitaire des usines Ford à Detroit — sits with the League of Nations reports Destouches produced as a Health Section employee travelling in Europe and North America.

The 1941 book La Médecine chez Ford, a reworking of the earlier factory material, is printed here in its later form.

An appendix collects the surviving letters Destouches sent to the League of Nations, giving the volume a documentary tail that overlaps with the manuscripts published separately as On a les maîtres qu'on mérite.

Editorial matter — Jean-Pierre Dauphin and Henri Godard's introduction, a bibliography and an index — frames the whole.

The Semmelweis thesis reads as a literary tragedy dressed as a medical study. Céline traces Semmelweis from Vienna to Budapest, follows the fall of the mortality rate that proves his handwashing procedure works, and then follows the professional refusal that destroys him.

The shorter medical papers around it are the sober counterweight — factory hygiene, quinine dosages, tropical medicine, dispensary economics. They read as a doctor addressing other doctors.

The Ford section is the pivot. Destouches inspects the medical service inside a modern American car plant and reports back to French hospital audiences on what industrial-scale worker medicine looks like. The tone stays professional; the observations are the ones that later reappear in Journey to the End of the Night's Detroit chapters.

The League of Nations reports document the international-public-health period — the years Destouches was travelling as a Health Section employee before he turned to fiction.