Benjamin Gagnon Chainey: Experimental Medecine Through "Bouvard et Pécuchet"

“Intellectual flexibility is primordial to capturing the paradoxes not only in literature, but at the very heart of medical practice.” According to 2017 Trudeau scholar Benjamin Gagnon Chainey, this is one of the fundamental lessons drawn by apprentices Bouvard and Pécuchet in Gustave Flaubert’s eponymous novel. Gagnon Chainey’s article, “The (Off)Springs of Literature and Experimental Medicine,” has been published in the online journal Medical and Health Humanities: A Department Without Walls. Through a medico-literary analysis of Flaubert’s novel, Gagnon Chainey’s text engages with the experimental medicine developed by French physiologist Claude Bernard.

Read Gagnon Chainey’s article here.