Rhetoric, enterprise and professional authority: physicians and writing in twentieth-century France

Abstract

The article examines the career of the little studied James-Edward Ruffier, a physician who won commercial success as well as political and popular renown as a physical culturist and natural health practitioner in France in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the importance of writing for Ruffier’s business model. Writing across a range of genres, largely in self-published periodical titles, became a way to turn subscribers into clients. But in more diffuse ways it was also a bid to achieve broader social influence. The article identifies the rhetorical and performative strategies at the heart of this process, strategies that show that Ruffier was bringing to bear far more than his technical medical knowledge in the attempt to persuade the general public of the merits of his approach to life. It also seeks to situate Ruffier’s relationship to writing within the broader history of the ‘physician-writer’ in Third Republican France (1870-1940). Ruffier was one of many such figures, whose career trajectories have much to tell us about more general themes, including the medicalization of body culture in this period and the processes by which doctors acquired the kind of cultural authority that made them trusted voices on a range of issues within and beyond medicine.

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