Literary Epistemification: Tracing the epidemiological and medical metaphors in the Nineteenth century European novel

Abstract

This article explores the intersection of medical and literary discourses in nineteenth-century literature by examining key texts such as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Balzac’s The Country Doctor. Through close textual analysis, the study highlights how literary representations of disease function as both reflections and critiques of contemporary medical epistemologies. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of supplementation, the article argues that the literary deployment of disease metaphors extends beyond narrative aesthetics to contribute to the broader ontology of medical knowledge. By foregrounding the autonomy of literary form, the paper suggests that authors engage with medical discourse in ways that are interpretive, fragmented, and deeply personal, thus positioning literature as a site of cultural knowledge production. Furthermore, the metaphorical language surrounding illness and diagnosis becomes a tool for epistemic reform within the literary domain, enabling alternative modes of meaning-making that are fluid and idiosyncratic. The article also investigates the autoethnographic dimensions of Dickens’s writing in Bleak House, tracing how social, medical, and literary registers converge to produce a complex, interwoven discourse. Ultimately, this study emphasizes literature’s role in shaping, supplementing, and occasionally unsettling dominant medical narratives of the nineteenth century. The paper further allows to see how literature’s epistemificatory function produce sporadic possibilities through fungibility of metaphors. Further by tracing the complex network of autoethnographic tendencies of Dickens in Bleak House, we try to analyze the relationship between the social, literary and medical discourses at play.