This paper revisits the stereotype of empathetic reading as theorised at the beginning of the 19th century, where so-called “romantic” literature was often perceived as leading to the pathological imitation of its works. There is a tendency to add this phenomenon to the file condemning romanticism and linking it to disease. Yet these representations of empathetic readings seem to be more ambivalent than this tendency would allow : the capacity of the work to affect the reader in his/her soul and body is revealed to be for both good and evil and makes of the work a sort of pharmakon. This paper revisit three texts, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), Alexandre Pouchkine’s Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (1830) and Honoré de Balzac’s Modeste Mignon (1844), in the light of this prism.