[Doctor Pascal Rougon. An imaginary predecessor]

Through the Rougon-Macquart series and the cases described in the last volume (Le Docteur Pascal, 1893), clinical analysis of the 58 characters identifies only seven neurotics and six alcoholics (only three of whom were Rougon-Macquart by birth). All the other illness described are unrelated to hysteria in the family. It remains true, however, that Zola's interpretation of hereditary degeneracy follows that of contemporary medical teaching, as witnessed by the genealogics published by Charcot in 1893. Through the voice of Dr. Pascal, however, Zola does challenge the concepts of heredity advanced by his medical advisors: he envisages the concepts of dominance and recessiveness without devising any general scheme for the transmission of hereditary characteristics, but eight years before Vries he advanced the idea of mutations, which he interprets as accidents occurring at the beginning of the ovum's development. When faced by the lack of success of his opotherapy of degenerative diseases, Pascal initiates trials versus a placebo and puts forward a highly coherent theory of what we would now call the placebo effect. It appears, therefore, that contrary to the opinion of most commentators, Emile Zola was in fact capable of a remarkable subtleness when he ventured into medicine. Through Dr Pascal Rougon, and notwithstanding the mockery of Flaubert, Goncourt and France (and of many others), he was a brilliant trail-blazer in the fields of genetics and therapeutics. Six years later he was to strike again with Dr Boutan, who invented what we now know as the prophylactic care of mothers and children (Fécondité, 1898).