Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/18/2026
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
Marissa Larochelle, University of Utah, joins Sara Phenix (French & Italian) as our colloquium speakers on Friday, September 18 at 3:30pm in 4010 JFSB. Their presentation examines Maurice Renard’s The Doctored Man (1921), a science fiction novella about a World War I soldier whose experimental eyes allow him to see electricity, raising questions about medical ethics, technology, and the boundaries between science and the supernatural. Refreshments will be served.
*Please note that this event will be held on Friday rather than during our regular scheduled slot
Title: Retrovision: The Science (Fiction) of Ophthalmology
Equal parts detective story, medical mystery, and science fiction, Maurice Renard’s novella L’Homme truqué [The Doctored Man] (1921) recounts the return of Jean Lebris to the village of Belvoux after the end of World War I. Though he survives the war, Jean has lost his sight in a blinding battlefield explosion—or so he claims. The doctor-narrator eventually learns that the young man can see, after a fashion: Jean has electroscopic eyes that allow him to perceive electricity, the result of a mad medical experiment during his time as a prisoner of war. The narrative’s ensuing intrigue explores the speculative possibilities of ocular bionics and the ethics of medical experimentation while raising the specter of the super soldier. What also surfaces in L’Homme truqué is Renard’s notion of the merveilleux-scientifique (scientific marvelous)—a conceptual contradiction emplotted in the narrative in the blurred epistemological boundary between the scientific and the irrational. This paradigmatic entanglement serves as a critique of positivism and a symptom of the historical post-WWI retreat into spiritualism after the mechanized devastation of global conflict. Our interdisciplinary presentation aims to shed light on this particular moment in literary and medical history and, more generally, to exploit the interpretive possibilities of the health humanities.
About our presenters:
Marissa B. Larochelle is an associate professor in the University of Utah Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the John A. Moran Eye Center and specializes in cataract surgery as well as the diagnosis and management of patients with infectious and inflammatory conditions of the eye. She has co-authored over seventeen articles published in high-impact ophthalmology journals like American Journal of Ophthalmology and Clinical Infectious Diseases. Dr. Larochelle received her medical degree from the University of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington, Vermont, and completed a residency at the University of Colorado, Aurora, Colorado. She completed a fellowship in Uveitis and Ocular Immunology at the Moran Eye Center.
Sara Phenix is an associate professor of French at Brigham Young University. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. She has published her work on fashion and medicine in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Dix-Neuf, and Romance Notes and has presented her research at Dartmouth, Vassar, Boston University, and the Triangle-area universities (Duke, UNC, and NC State). Her current book project on the aesthetic, medical, and political significance of the corset is titled Bodice Politic: How the Corset Shaped Modern France.
