Zola and the scientific method

I was really interested in what we began talking about in class yesterday, with the scientific method being applied to literature by Zola. I was kind of wary “believing” this could be done, for a few reasons. I relate it to the relationship between science and medicine. I will be going to medical school next year and I’ve spent time in labs and with patients. There is a huge difference between results you can get in a lab versus what actually happens when you apply this to patients, for many reasons. As everybody is different, this means that no patient, and thus no disease/ailment/treatment, is the same. People will react differently to drugs, their specific disease may have a different course of progression, etc. In additional to this, you then have to take into account that every patient’s experience is different- for example, a certain doctor might prescribe something a little different, patients might not take their medicine, they might be exposed to an additional infection due to their environment, etc. Medicine is an imperfect science, and every situation is different, even if in a lab, or theoretically, a patient with X symptoms should have Y disease which we should treat with Z drugs to get X result. This does not happen all the time in reality.

My point is that when relating this back to Zola’s application of the scientific method to literature, I am wary that Zola says that we can learn what a person will do in a certain situation, because I believe that everybody reacts differently to situations. It’s all about your perspective and how you view the situation and how you choose to react. I do agree that by observing situations you can learn a huge amount about human characters, personalities, and values- however, I don’t think you could ever say that in X situation everyone will do Y with the result being Z. Humans are just too complicated for that!