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Mea Culpa and the Life and Work of Semmelweis
Rare book, first english translation edition
- GenresHistory
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1937
1 person is currently reading
47 people want to read
About the author
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
177 books2,594 followersLouis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name of Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, is best known for his works Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), and Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan). His highly innovative writing style using Parisian vernacular, vulgarities, and intentionally peppering ellipses throughout the text was used to evoke the cadence of speech.
Louis-Ferdinand Destouches was raised in Paris, in a flat over the shopping arcade where his mother had a lace store. His parents were poor (father a clerk, mother a seamstress). After an education that included stints in Germany and England, he performed a variety of dead-end jobs before he enlisted in the French cavalry in 1912, two years before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. While serving on the Western Front he was wounded in the head and suffered serious injuries—a crippled arm and headaches that plagued him all his life—but also winning a medal of honour. Released from military service, he studied medicine and emigrated to the USA where he worked as a staff doctor at the newly build Ford plant in Detroit before returning to France and establishing a medical practice among the Parisian poor. Their experiences are featured prominently in his fiction.
Although he is often cited as one of the most influential and greatest writers of the twentieth century, he is certainly viewed as a controversial figure. After embracing fascism, he published three antisemitic pamphlets, and vacillated between support and denunciation of Hitler. He fled to Germany and Denmark in 1945 where he was imprisoned for a year and declared a national disgrace. He then received amnesty and returned to Paris in 1951.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Henry Miller, William Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski have all cited him as an important influence.
Translated Profiles:
Луи-Фердинанд Селин
Louis-Ferdinand Destouches was raised in Paris, in a flat over the shopping arcade where his mother had a lace store. His parents were poor (father a clerk, mother a seamstress). After an education that included stints in Germany and England, he performed a variety of dead-end jobs before he enlisted in the French cavalry in 1912, two years before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. While serving on the Western Front he was wounded in the head and suffered serious injuries—a crippled arm and headaches that plagued him all his life—but also winning a medal of honour. Released from military service, he studied medicine and emigrated to the USA where he worked as a staff doctor at the newly build Ford plant in Detroit before returning to France and establishing a medical practice among the Parisian poor. Their experiences are featured prominently in his fiction.
Although he is often cited as one of the most influential and greatest writers of the twentieth century, he is certainly viewed as a controversial figure. After embracing fascism, he published three antisemitic pamphlets, and vacillated between support and denunciation of Hitler. He fled to Germany and Denmark in 1945 where he was imprisoned for a year and declared a national disgrace. He then received amnesty and returned to Paris in 1951.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Henry Miller, William Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski have all cited him as an important influence.
Translated Profiles:
Луи-Фердинанд Селин
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 30, 2012
A scathing condemnation of Communist Russia paired with Celine's doctoral thesis, a partly fictionalized biography of the doctor who urged obstetricians to wash their hands to prevent unnecessary deaths. The latter may be the most straightforward and lyrical prose Celine ever wrote. Highly recommended for fans of any of his work.
* * * * *
from Mea Culpa:
It can't be too soon! Down with the bosses! Step on it! All stinking rubbish! Lumped all together, or taken one by one!
Misery has become the by-product of the whole History of the modern world. The cheapest and most negative arrogance, the emptiest fatuity, the overpowering madness of envy obsess all these dissemblers, in that enormous leper-house of to-morrow, in their socializing quarantine.
from Semmelweis:
Is this not another remarkable quality, perhaps the most precious of all, for those who triumph over the unknown in the realm of Science -- that of being able to recognize the one certain and indispensable fact, no matter how brief its appearance may be, among the army of parallel facts without any immediate or possible importance?
In the chaos of this world, consciousness is only a little, flickering light, precious but fragile. You cannot light a volcano with a candle.
Now he wandered, with the rest of the mad, into the absolute, into those glacial solitudes where human passions awaken no echo, or where the terror-stricken human heart, beating to break itself on the road to the Void, becomes nothing but a stupid little lost animal.
* * * * *
from Mea Culpa:
It can't be too soon! Down with the bosses! Step on it! All stinking rubbish! Lumped all together, or taken one by one!
Misery has become the by-product of the whole History of the modern world. The cheapest and most negative arrogance, the emptiest fatuity, the overpowering madness of envy obsess all these dissemblers, in that enormous leper-house of to-morrow, in their socializing quarantine.
from Semmelweis:
Is this not another remarkable quality, perhaps the most precious of all, for those who triumph over the unknown in the realm of Science -- that of being able to recognize the one certain and indispensable fact, no matter how brief its appearance may be, among the army of parallel facts without any immediate or possible importance?
In the chaos of this world, consciousness is only a little, flickering light, precious but fragile. You cannot light a volcano with a candle.
Now he wandered, with the rest of the mad, into the absolute, into those glacial solitudes where human passions awaken no echo, or where the terror-stricken human heart, beating to break itself on the road to the Void, becomes nothing but a stupid little lost animal.
October 19, 2021
Okay, not great. The Life of Semmelweis saved it for me. I bought this to read of his reaction to having experienced Bolshevism in Russia and while agreeing with him, I wasn't exactly impressed with his report. I really liked "Journey to the End of the Night" and wanted to read some of his other work. This is okay for a completist but not something I would recommend to start with or to even read ahead of his more famous or infamous material.
September 15, 2022
Wow. The story of Semmelweis is a shocking indictment of men's resistance to changes in the paradigm of medical science. Semmelweis, like Celine himself, lacked tact, which was his downfall. To call your colleagues "assassins" for not following his hygiene rules, long before Lister, Pasteur, and the acceptance of "germ theory" of disease, well, that was never going to go down well, despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Celine quotes" J.S. Mill: "If it were discovered that the truths of geometyry might annoy men, they would have been declared false a long time ago."
That this is a medical thesis might seem strange because much of it is written as something of a diatribe, though much more subdued that Celine's other works, such as Mea Culpa for an adjacent example. It discursive and sometimes tangential, but fascinating. Like Celine, Semmelweis endured being an outcast, and suffered mentally from it. Celine blamed his own cerebral contrariness on a mythical trepanned head wound. The seeds of his later epigrammatic, staccatic style are not in full evidence here, but the two pieces are unmistakably Celine.
That this is a medical thesis might seem strange because much of it is written as something of a diatribe, though much more subdued that Celine's other works, such as Mea Culpa for an adjacent example. It discursive and sometimes tangential, but fascinating. Like Celine, Semmelweis endured being an outcast, and suffered mentally from it. Celine blamed his own cerebral contrariness on a mythical trepanned head wound. The seeds of his later epigrammatic, staccatic style are not in full evidence here, but the two pieces are unmistakably Celine.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews