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Apparently a Ph.D. thesis, the author has offered a very delightful, well written, instructive and entertaining book. It is but 142 large octavo pages with index and bibliography, but they are well worth reading as presenting an excellent picture of the doctor of France, and elsewhere, as conceived by the French playwriters of the period.
One has to turn, to the dramatists and story tellers of any period to get the proper perspective of what the people of that period were like, and even if such descriptions have malice or satire or buffoonery behind them, so much the better, since these attributes are invariably related to the affective aspects of interpersonal relations and go much further in sketching personalities than do the pedantic descriptions of scholars.
One might wish we had more works of this kind, well informed and skilfully written. Naturally Molière's doctors come in for extended discussion. Molière after all was a great reformer, not only of doctors, but of society in general. He mirrored the people in all their masks and disguises with a technique applicable to the times and the characters. In our phantasy we have occasionally imagined how Freud might have written a play in which irony and satire were used to reach the goal of characterization. We suspect he would have been ‘liquidated’ as the farcical Russians put it.
At all events Molière and his confreres—there are a number discussed in this excellent thesis—did a service. It still continues with Shaw as an outstanding present day protagonist. There is much here of value to the psychoanalyst, for he, too, is not foolproof.