The confusion over dates seems to come about because there were two different films (neither dated 1909). Le Mari et la doctoresse was made in 1907 and Max et la doctoresse (this film) in 1914. Both may have starred Linder although there is no certainty about the earlier film.
In between the two (1911), Georges Monca also made La Doctoresse with Charles Prince (whose "Rigadin" series commenced the following year so that this films is sometimes given the title Rigadin et la doctoresse).
What is clear from the catalogue description of the 1909 film is that the second two films are not just remakes of the first but, in some sense responses, to it.
All three films are strongly anti-feminist along much the same lines as Alice Guy's Les Résultats du féminisme of 1906 where men relegated to the house by career wives, rebel against the indignity of being left to look after babies. Guy made what sounds from the surviving review - the film is lost - like a rather different version in the US in 1912 - In the Year 2000 - and some have imagined, although there is no real evidence, that it was Gaumont himself who was responsible for the strongly anti-feminist slant of the original film.
The 1909 film treats the subject with a certain irony. The husband does try to rebel (as in the Guy film and does (as here) get jealous, but, in Le Mari et la doctoresse, the woman-doctor is made of sterner stuff and it is the rebellious husband who gets kicked out of the house not her male patient of whom he is jealous. The film ends, not with domestic bliss restored but with the subdued husband being given a great basketful of socks to darn, ruefully musing "If only I had known!" ("Ah, si j'avais su !"). The moral is still, by implication, anti-feminist but it is not (as in the other films) the man who wins the day.
The 1911 film was written by two well-known dramatists and the husband responds to the problem of his wife's neglect, on the advice of his friend, by philandering. In this case it is she, not he, who is jealous, and she abandons her profession to save her marriage.
The 1914 film is more similar to that of 1909 in that, as with the various men in Guy's film, the heroes in both cases find themselves left, quite literally, holding the baby. Only the ending is different. If Linder did play the part of the husband in both films, then the changed perspective is very interesting. A superstar in 1914 (as he was not in 1907 and could easily have appeared uncredited in the earlier film), Max may have felt the need to recast himself in a more virile mode.
There may have been more personal reasons still, now that Linder was writing and directing his own films for altering the outcome of the film. Ten years later it would be Linder's tendency to morbid jealousy that would end not only his career but his life and that of his teenage wife.
For a serious and powerful film about a woman-doctor see Pyotr Chardynin's A Woman of Tomorrow which also came out in 1914 and is one of the best films of that year. This is not quite the "feminist" film it is sometimes made out to be; indeed there is a sense in which its conclusion has common ground with the anti-feminist comedies. But it is very definitely not anti-feminist and presents the situation of the busy and successful career-woman as a genuine and serious dilemma.
