[Malaria and the work of two writer-physicians: Louis Ferdinand Celine and Carlo Levi]. / Le paludisme dans l'oeuvre de deux écrivains médecins: Louis Ferdinand Céline et Carlo Levi.

Malaria rarely mentioned in literary works has been dealt with by the two writers, both physicians, studied here. Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (1894-1961) alias Celine, studied medicine in Rennes and Paris from 1921 to 1924. He had been previously engaged by the Rockefeller Foundation to lecture on tuberculosis in Brittany. He later worked for the Commission of Hygiene of the League of Nations in Geneva and took part in 1925 to a long voyage in America (Cuba, United States) and Italy where malaria was still occurring. In 1926 he published a book: La quinine en therapeutique and participated to another voyage in West Africa where he contracted malaria. Numerous hints to this disease inspired to Celine by his first trip to Africa (Cameroun) in 1916-17 are found in Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932). Carlo Levi (1902-1975) studied medicine in Torino from 1919 to 1924. Painter and writer he wrote there his masterpiece: Christ has stopped in Eboli (1945). Malaria which then decimated a very poor population of peasants abandoned to themselves represents the background of the book and it is as a competent and human physician that C. Levi gained the friendship of the inhabitants of this remote and inhospitable province.