The Necessary Evil (original: Le Mal Nécessaire) and its sequel Caresco Superman (original: Caresco Surhomme, 1904) were written by André Couvreur. Couvreur (1863-1944) was a French doctor and author who wrote a number of fantastic and science fictional books.

The Necessary Evil is about Dr. Armand Caresco, an insane surgeon. An Austrian Jew, Caresco moved to France and changed both his citizenship and his religion so as to persuade the French that he was a trustworthy surgeon. Although Caresco became famous and celebrated, with many rich patrons, his seemingly noble actions were camouflage to disguise his interest in vivisection of humans to enhance his own medical knowledge and reputation. “His operations attract doctors from all over the world, and he is admired by young practitioners and the ratés. With a mania for operating and with a cynical contempt for human life, he does not hesitate to apply the knife to all who consult him, especially when in need of money for his mistress.”¹ In Caresco Superman Caresco has taken control of the Pacific island of Eucrasia. Caresco applies his methods to the inhabitants of the island, altering them to better do their jobs. The captain of the plane which brings outsiders to Eucrasia is a limbless trunk with telescopic vision. Even the island itself is in the shape of a human body. The natives of Eucrasia are addicted to various sensual pleasures and generally submit to Caresco’s rule, for fear that he will castrate them or worse. On Eucrasia Caresco makes use of “omnium,” a mysterious and unexplained power source, to create scientific prodigies: a machine capable of stripping the years from human bodies and reversing the aging process, a fast underground train system, food pills, omnium-powered diving suits, and so on. But Caresco is insane as well as brilliant, and is given to such things as collecting the spleens of all those he operates on. Eventually Caresco dies and Eucrasia is destroyed in a volcanic explosion.

The Necessary Evil and Caresco Superman are of interest both for their content—Brian Stableford, translator of both, writes that Caresco Superman “reproduces the flippant melodrama and surreal tinge of Jarry’s novel [The Supermale (original: Le Sûrmale, 1902)] and fuses its striking Symbolist decoration with a Zolaesque hard-headedness”²—and because of Dr. Caresco himself. Caresco is one of the first insane surgeons in popular literature, following only Frederic Van Rensselaer Dey’s Doctor Quartz (see: The Doctor Quartz Mysteries) and Louise Michel’s Les Microbes humaines (1886), which “features a physician-torturer, Dr. Gaël, who performs a vivisection on a pregnant woman, forcing her to describe her pain as he operates. She dies in surgery.”³ Caresco’s influence on English-language insane surgeon narratives was minimal—neither Caresco novel was translated into English until the twenty-first century—and the popularity of the insane surgeon character type in the pulps is due more to its appearance in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Mystery “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” (1913). Later iterations of the character would be based on the historical actions of German doctors under the Nazis.

Caresco’s other aspect of interest is the way in which he fulfills the antisemitic stereotype of the evil Jewish doctor who pretends to be French as a way to ally suspicions. This was a recurring stereotype in late nineteenth-century Europe, with the Germans leading the way,⁴ but a particularly poisonous one in France, where venom against Jewish doctors was encoded into the Encyclopédie (1751-1772),⁵ the representation of Enlightenment thought, and where the atmosphere during and after the heyday of the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1898) was very bad.⁶ While doctors in France were scorned by the public and the intelligentsia for a number of reasons,⁷ Jewish doctors were singled out:

It is easy to see how this demographic shift (i.e., the growth in the population of Parisian Jews), together with the increased immigration that took place in fin-de-siècle France and the sense of humiliation and betrayal that followed the defeat of 1870 would provide a fertile breeding ground for xenophobia. When one considers that, at the same time, a bleak diagnosis that carried the stamp of medical approval was circulating, a diagnosis according to which France was terminally ill, victim of a declining population, rampant immorality, flourishing crime, an increase in physical and social pathologies from alcoholism and suicide to prostitution and syphilis in short, when one understands that the literate population found it impossible to peruse a newspaper without finding therein a sample of what has been dubbed the “discourse of degeneration” one is in a better position to understand the angst of the period and the need to find a scapegoat for France’s problems. It has been said that all prejudices obey the same logic. Thus, the rhetoric of anti-Semitism had much in common with that of antifeminism and with a more generalized xenophobia. And since physicians, like Jews and foreigners and women, were thought to be profiting from and even contributing to the nation’s decline, they too became targets of a rhetoric of hatred. In particular, they were held responsible for the secularization of the French state and thus with Jews and foreigners and women were seen as enemies of traditional morality, the Catholic Church, and “the old France”… It is in the figure of the Jewish physician, portrayed as an archetypal villain, that xenophobia meets anti-science. A whole cluster of perceived similarities, numerous enough to explode the distinction between physicians and Jews, contributes to the notion that the two groups are co-conspirators.⁸

Print: André Couvreur, The Necessary Evil, transl. Brian Stableford. Tarzana, CA: Black Coat Press, 2014.

¹ William H. Scheifley, Brieux and Contemporary French Society (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917), 228.

² Brian Stableford, “Speculative Sex: The First Gropings,” The New York Review of Science Fiction, accessed Nov. 13, 2018, https://www.nyrsf.com/2014/11/brian-stableford-speculative-sex-the-first-gropings.html.

³ Mary Donaldson-Evans, Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857-1894 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 176.

⁴ John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-siècle Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 31.

⁵ Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Jews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 58. Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky’s Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880-1918 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2014) is quite good on antisemitism around Europe at this time.

⁶ See, for example, Stephen Wilson’s Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017).

⁷ Donaldson-Evans, Medical Examinations, 178-186.

⁸ Donaldson-Evans, Medical Examinations, 188-190.