Ten of the best bad doctors in fiction

For the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best bad doctors in fiction.

One character on the list:

Charles Bovary

Emma Bovary's dull husband is an incompetent doctor. In one of the most painful episodes in Flaubert's novel, Homais, the creepy local chemist, encourages Bovary to attempt a revolutionary new surgical procedure to cure the clubfoot of a servant. The operation is a disaster, leading to the man having his whole leg amputated.

Read about the other doctors on Mullan's list.

Madame Bovary is on Mullan's lists of ten of the best bad lawyers in literature and ten of the best lotharios in literature, Valerie Martin's list of six novels about doomed marriages, and Louis Begley's list of favorite novels about cheating lovers. It tops Peter Carey's list of the top ten works of literature and was second on a top ten works of literature list selected by leading writers from Britain, America and Australia in 2007. It is one of John Bowe's six favorite books on love.

--Marshal Zeringue