Genre:

Abstract

Publications abstracted:

Oliver W Holmes Atlantic Monthly Magazine

Subjects:

Morality, Imagination, Disciplinarity, Boundary Formation

People mentioned:

Émile Zola

    Holmes insists that 'when the poet or the story-teller invades the province of the man of science, he is on dangerous grounds [...]. The imaginative writer is after effects. The scientific man is after truth. Science is decent, modest; does not try to startle, but to instruct. The same scenes and objects which outrage every sense of delicacy in the story-teller's highly-coloured paragraphs can be read without giving offence in the chaste language of the physiologist or physician [....] Leave the description of the drains and cesspools to the hygienic specialist, the painful facts of disease to the physician'.