In June 1919, C�line went to Bordeaux and completed the second part of his

baccalaur�at. Through his work with the Institute C�line had come into contact, and
good standing, with Monsieur Follet, the director of the medical school in Rennes.
On 11 August 1919, C�line married Follet's daughter �dith Follet, whom he had known
for some time.[9] With Monsieur Follet's influence, C�line was accepted as a
student at the university. On 15 June 1920, his wife gave birth to a daughter,
Colette Destouches. During this time, he studied intensively obtaining certificates
in physics, chemistry, and natural sciences. By 1923, three years after he had
started the medical program at Rennes, C�line had almost completed his medical
degree. His doctoral thesis, The Life and Work of Ignaz Semmelweis, completed in
1924, is actually considered to be his first literary work. Ignaz Semmelweis's
contribution to medicine "was immense and, according to C�line, was directly
proportional to the misery of his life."[10] In 1924 C�line took up the post of
intern at a Paris maternity hospital.

In 1925, C�line left his family, never to return. Working for the newly founded
League of Nations, he travelled to Switzerland, England, the Cameroons, Canada, the
United States, and Cuba. At this time he wrote the play L'Eglise (1933; The
Church).

In 1926, he visited America, and was sent to Detroit to study the conditions of the
workers at the Ford Automotive Company. Seeing the effects of the "assembly line"
disgusted him. His article described the plant as a sensory attack on the worker,
and how this attack had literally made the worker part of the machine.

In 1928, C�line returned to medicine to establish a private practice in Montmartre,

in the north of Paris, specializing in obstetrics.[11]

He ended his private practice in 1931 to work in a public dispensary.

C�line's best-known work is considered to be Journey to the End of the Night

(Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932). It violated many of the literary conventions of
the time, using the rhythms and the vocabulary of slang and vulgar speech in a more
consistent and occasionally more difficult way than earlier writers, who had made
similar attempts in the tradition of Fran�ois Villon (notably �mile Zola).[citation
needed] The book was a success, but C�line was not awarded the Prix Goncourt
despite strong support. The award went to Guy Mazeline's novel Les Loups (The
Wolves). The voting was controversial enough to become the subject of a book
(Goncourt 32 by Eug�ne Saccomano, 1999). The first English translation was by John
H. P. Marks in 1934. A more current English translation is by Ralph Manheim in
1983.

In 1936, C�line published Mort � cr�dit (Death on the Installment Plan), presenting
an innovative, chaotic, and antiheroic vision of human suffering. In it he
extensively used ellipses throughout the text to enhance the rhythm and emphasise
the style of speech. In both these books he showed himself to be a great stylistic
innovator and a masterly storyteller. French author Jean-Paul Sartre publicly
praised C�line at this time.