Literature

Allô docteur bobo

4 reading minutes

written by Arthur Billerey · 05 April 2022 · 0 comment

Docteur femme © Pixabay

With humor and generosity, Alice Bergerac benevolently breaks medical secrecy and brings together in a variety of anecdotes several encounters with her patients since she started medical school.

It's a funny scene. On the second floor of a village retirement home, the patient Madame Duchamp, out of her depth, angry, vociferates harsh words and resists the auscultation of general practitioner Alice Bergerac, attacking stethoscope and blood pressure monitor with her fingernails. The only way to calm her down is quite unusual. The only way to complete her work and auscultate her patient is to make her sing. In other words, to sing a song that the patient, Madame Duchamp, will carry on mechanically, without thinking too much, suddenly retracting her fingernails, letting down her guard and her weapons. The song is the only subterfuge to lighten the mood, and perhaps the patient's ills: «Au clair de la luuneu, Madameu Duchamp, lend me your plumeu... to write a moot!»

Doctor

In the form of a diary-like collection of professional anecdotes, Alice Bergerac crystallizes her encounters in a white coat through the details she has retained, the originality of the moment, the joy or anxiety felt, which sometimes make the anecdote what memory retains best and what remains of the past most true, or at least most evocative, as William Ellery Channing so aptly put it: «An anecdote tells us more about a man than a volume of biography.»

And humor is omnipresent, whether in the style, the choice of anecdotes or the way they are approached. Like this encounter with a TVA, in the chapter «Retour des TVA (Types qui Vivent Ailleurs)», inside an EHPAD, with a sort of Marcel Duchamp of the unit who, in his delirium, takes the liberty of answering the GP's questions with image-rich poetry worthy of André Breton and the greatest surrealists: «Georges, are you in pain? - I'm never afraid. I walk on sidewalks when there's sun on them.»

Behind the omnipresent humour, depth

This humor, which captivates the reader, does not exclude a few more serious detours into medicine as a discipline, with scattered information on the medical consultation: «It's written all over the medical books that at the same age, in fourteen seconds of consultation, the counter-transference is made and you go from a doctor-patient relationship to a relationship of the type: “Damn, but this guy... it's me”.»

In addition to this information and the manuals, the daily life of the profession is also described in practical terms, with, for example, what patients may offer during home visits before leaving, such as a cup of coffee or a bite to eat. The reader is also invited to participate and guess what's coming next, making certain chapters of the book almost a game, with the anecdote becoming participatory: «Fill in the blanks between these two extreme examples yourself to complete the range of culinary proposals we receive on a daily basis.»

Without excluding a few literary or musical references, from Hemingway to Bashung, general practitioner Alice Bergerac places human beings at the heart of her work, the human beings of consultations, those who suffer and are healed, those who need to be stitched up and repaired, touching the reader directly in the chest with her investigative approach to sharing their joys, laughter and sobs. Isn't our raison d'être intimately networked with the lives of others? Doctor's prescription: «A good book for morale, to be repeated as often as necessary.»

Write to the author: arthur.billerey@leregardlibre.com