Incurable and Intolerable: Chronic Disease and Slow Death in Nineteenth-Century France

Jason Szabo. Incurable and Intolerable: Chronic Disease and Slow Death in Nineteenth- Century France. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. x + 295 pp. $49.95 (978-0-8135-4545-5).

In an era of increasingly heroic medicine, certain chronic diseases presented an intractable problem for the nineteenth-century medical profession. How did doctors respond to the limits of their ability to treat disease? As Jason Szabo demonstrates in his nuanced and humane account of chronic illness in nineteenthcentury France, it was with a mixture of compassion, frustration, pessimism, defensiveness, and professional jealousy. The book explores the development of palliative care in the context of emerging disease models, particularly the tensions between individual manifestations and experience of illness and the construction of universal disease categories. Szabo, a Montréal-based clinician and historian, usefully draws out resonances with contemporary issues relating to the care of chronic and terminal illness.

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