The primal scene of “medical humanities” in Rachilde

Criticism has long engaged with medical discourse present in literary texts (medical humanities), a well-established critical trend in English-speaking academic contexts. Rachilde’s work lends itself to these approaches, particularly concerning discourses on sexual pathologies and gender matters articulated and interrogated in her fin-de-siècle novels, which nevertheless persist in the late novel La Femme-Dieu (1934), rich in matters of interest to medical humanities criticism.