Teaching verse s for Litarature and...

Teaching verse s for Litarature and Medicine

Couser, G Thomas. 1997 Recovering Bodies: IIIness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Pres $5500 hc $2495 sc xiv +314pp

Furst Lilian R 1998 Between Doctors and Patients: The Changing Balance of Power. Charlottesville: University Pres of Virginaia. $3750 hc.xii + 287 pp

Gilman, Sander L 1995 Picturing Health and IIIness: Images of Identity and Difference. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Pres $2995 hc 200 pp

Panourgia, Neni. 1995 Fragments of Death, Fables of Identlty. strange Directions In Anthropological Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Pres $5500 hc $1995 sc 244pp

Vrettos, Athena. 1995 Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian improvement Standford: Stanford University Press. $3950 hc $1495 sc xii + 250pp

Waxman, Barbara Frey 1997 To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographics of Aglag. Charlottesville: Unversity Pres of Virginia. $3650 hc x + 185 pp

With the advent of The On-Line Database of Literature, Arts and Medicine (revised 1996) end the Hippocrates Project at the recently made known York University School of Medicine, it has became plausible one time more (as it had with Joanne Trautmann and Carol Pollard's publication of an extensive annotated bibliography in the 70s) to teach a more comprehensive literature and medicine course. These annotated bibliographies of literary sources related to medicine provide us with a sense of the range of offerings in literature for the teaching of like an interdisciplinary course. Two resources are not, however, further in place. The first is an anthologized wager of texts such as has solitary recently become available in literature and law as the proceed of the efforts of Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette in her three-volume Law in Literature (a book each on legal themes in short stories, novellas, and drama). The secondary is attention to pulling together secondary sources from the variety of disciplines that inform literature and medicine as an interdisciplinary enterprise. It is the latter lack that this review essay will attempt, however partially, to address.

To begin, Lilian Furst's Between Doctors and Patients propounds a wellresearched study of the cultural authority of physicians and institutional medicine as they relate to literature one as well as the other as background to and in the foreground of literary works. Ranging from the nineteenth end the twentieth century, the inquiry begins in England and gravitates to situate itself in American medical practices, monitoring activity at the bedside as well as in the hospital, laboratory, and medical teach Using as her central image the relation of patient and doctor, Furst examines what she relates to as "the etiquette of power" (18) particularly as it relates to access to medical care and the suppression of alternative voices within the profession of medicine. Not barely the female presence in medicine further the presence of alternative medical practices become issues here as we watch professionalized medicine lengthen the lengthy arms of its control until it preempt patient empowerment and posits a scientific priesthood.

Furst has the suitable sense and a sufficiently broad knowledge of the field to chart the evolution of medical technology (from percussion and stethoscope to antisepsis and anaethesia, first principle theory and x-rays). She traces the increase of institutionalized medicine (the influence of autopsies and access to public clinics in the growth of knowledge, as well as the growing in importance of licensing and regulation) and recognizes the importance of popular medical handbooks used in the household She begins her tour between the walls of medical mysteries with "missionaries at the bedside," a shared part that implicated patient, midwife, woman of the household, folk healer, and physician in the care of the ailing. Acknowledging the growing prominence of physicians, Furst transfers to study Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters and Anthony Trollope's Doctor Thorne, tracing their relations to patients and exploring the nature of medical practice in the nineteenth centenary countryside. The increasingly scientific nature of medicine takes her to George Eliot's Middlemarch, while the travails of female physicians lead her to William Dean Howells' Doctor Zay and Sarah Orne Jewett's A geographical division Doctor. The ethical dilemmas of laboratory medicine become the make liable of her analysis of Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith and A. J Cronin's The Citadel, with solitary a glancing reference to Mary Shelley's potentially more interesting Frankenstein and more attention to Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde