In order to understand the practices of a modern medicine based on an ideology of normal that privileges some voices while depriving others, I propose a philological, historical, philosophical, and theoretical review that questions how medicine links pathology and abnormality to defect. Unlike the medical model of the normal, the Naturalist novel’s representation of individuality complicates medicine’s universal design and problematizes the fixed categories of the normal and pathological. The particular characters of the novels demonstrate a sort of vitality of life—the individual’s creative abilities—that serve as the basis for alternative narratives and for thinking about different paradigms of care. Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart provide the environmental and social context through which we might examine medicine’s scientific claims on the human body. Still, the impressive scholarship on Zola has tended to establish the facile links between a burgeoning medical apparatus and thereby reintroduces a normative thinking of categorizing, standardizing, and correcting. In contrast, my dissertation retranslates and closely reads passages from Zola’s novels including L’assommoir (1877), La Joie de vivre (1884), which are then put in dialogue with Jules and Edmond de Goncourt’s Germinie Lacerteux (1864) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) in order to question the corrective and normative treatments that emerged from nineteenth-century medicine and science. Arising out of my careful examination of these authors’ unpredictable narratives, rhetorical strategies, and unique characters is the concept and methodology of “Troubling Medicine.” It provides a twofold perspective analysis that highlights the contributions of literature to medical discourse, which often reduces patients to mere objects of inquiry denying them active participation in their own care. First, new translations of passages of Zola’s works allow for the unsettling accounts of previous translations, interpretations, conclusions, and implications thereof. Second, close readings of Zola’s narrative strategies lend to hindering readers’ expectations and foreclosing absolute conclusions. Thus, “Troubling Medicine,” challenges our inherited notions of care and makes an appeal for new ideas and policies that might hold medicine answerable to the needs of patients and to the realities of individuals.