The Symptomatic Doctor (original) (raw)
Related papers
Medicalstudentitis as a rite of passage in popular literature
Tutorskaya M. Medicalstudentitis as a rite of passage in popular literature //Reading the Psychosomatic in Medical and Popular Culture. – Routledge, 2017. – С. 101-112., 2017
Medicalstudentitis, also known as medical students' disease or syndrome, is a psychosomatic disorder, a condition that involves both the mind (psyche) and body (soma) of a future doctor. The purpose of my paper is to investigate fiction narratives about this disease and to analyze the condition as an example of a rite of passage. I will follow the protagonists of The Memoirs of a Physician by Vikenty Veresaev, and Doctors by Erich Segal, analyzing their transition through preliminal, liminal, and postliminal steps, and their initiation to the formation of physicians.
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2023
This introduction to the special issue 'Writing Doctors and Writing Health in the Long Eighteenth Century' explores the various types of literary and visual creativity enacted by medical practitioners as they sought new ways of communicating and engaging with the public. Focusing on the shift from Latin to vernacular publishing in elite medical circles, we examine the proliferation of new opportunities open to physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, medical artists, midwives, and other women practitioners to express themselves. Novels, drama, poetry, artworks, almanacs, and letters, to name but a few creative products of the period, allowed new ideas and underrepresented voices to be heard for the first time, changing forever the way creative and empirical cultures would intertwine. Stemming from the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Writing Doctors: Medical Representation and Personality, ca. 1660-1832 (2018-22), this research has undoubtedly been impacted by the rapidly changing nature of public healthcare in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic that was still ongoing when this issue went to print. We value and celebrate connections made between the past and present that continue to assist us in understanding and caring for our bodies.
The Case of Anosognosia in Literary Doctors
The image of the doctor permeates literary works in a variety of forms: from the revered healer-gods, Aesculapius and Apollo, in heroic Greek mythology, to the parodies of human physicians as comic characters, errant fools or deranged individuals in the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Molière. 1 Before the late 19th century, "Doctor" was a generic title attributed to anyone who had mastery of some branch of knowledge, including medicine. 2 In the literature preceding England's Victorian era, medical doctors are often portrayed as "quacks and grotesques," due to "the anomalous social and professional status of medicine." 3 The medical skills attributed to these, often secondary or tertiary, characters are attributed are equal to those possessed by a tradesman of miracle elixirs. However, the doctor figures in Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe (1604); Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1818); and Middlemarch, by George Eliot (1872); are neither wily merchants nor quacks and grotesques. In fact, Faustus, Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Tertius Lydgate are profoundly intelligent and ambitious men. All three doctors have a vexing superiority complex: a side-effect of their intellectual capabilities. It is important to note that, despite their penchants for the pursuit of knowledge and propensities for exercising reason, Faustus, Frankenstein and Lydgate do share mediocre flaws with their subsidiary counterparts. Faustus embodies the temperament of a spoiled child, reveling in a hedonistic lifestyle and satiating his appetite for attention with magic tricks. Frankenstein wavers on the edge of madness before, during and after the conception of his creature. Dr. Lydgate is a socially tactless fool. His greatest error in judgment 1 McLellan, M. F. "Images of Physicians in Literature: From Quacks to Heroes." The Lancet, 348 no.
The Visceral Novel Reader and Novelized Medicine in Georgian Britain
Literature and Medicine 34.2 (2016): 341-69, 2016
The article introduces “the visceral novel reader” as a diachronic, context-sensitive mode of novelistic reception, in which fact and fiction overlap cognitively: the mental rehearsal of the activity of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching while reading novels and, vice versa, the mental rehearsal of novels in the act of perceiving the real world. Located at the intersection of literature, medicine and science, “the visceral novel reader” enhances our understanding of the role that novels played in the dialectic construction of erudition in English. In Georgian Britain, reading practices became a testing ground for the professionalization of physicians, natural philosophers, and men of letters. While it was in the professionals’ common interest to implement protocols that taught readers to separate body from mind, and fact from fiction, novels came to stand for “debased” (visceral) reading. Novels inverted these notions by means of medicalization (regimentation, somatization, and individuation) and contributed to the professional stratification of medicine and literature.
Amerikastudien/American Studies
In a 2016 article in The Guardian, Phil Whitaker explains why a substantial number of well-known writers are also medical doctors. Whitaker, who belongs in this group himself, lists Anton Chekhov, Michael Crichton, Khaled Hosseini, and a few others, to state his point: "Their ability to feel what others feel, and simultaneously to view it with detachment, gives us perhaps our greatest strength as writers." Importantly, it is the physician's skills that pave the way towards writing as a profession, and not literary excellence that helps make a professional healer: doctors virtually read "[e]ach patient's illness" as "a narrative-symptoms as the beginning, diagnosis as the ending-and a middle that weaves a coherent and irresistible path between the two." Such explanations sound logical and comprehensible, yet they evoke new questions as well: why does it seem to be, almost exclusively, men, who translate their interaction with patients into poetry and prose? What motivates them to do so? Does their creative engagement inform their work as medical doctors? And, most importantly, perhaps: what do we learn about the medical profession, about writing, about an era, when we replace the hierarchical concept of the doctor-becoming-awriter by the idea of a mutually inspiring relationship between two systems of knowledge acquisition? Sari Altschuler's The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States builds on this idea of reciprocity. The book approaches "the practice of writing" as a "valuable training of the medical mind" (5) and discusses a number of well-known American physician-writers who wrote poetry or prose between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As public intellectuals, they relied on what Altschuler calls "imaginative experimentation" (8-11) to study and discuss health-related topics, test medical theories, fill research gaps, and solve medical and philosophical contradictions. Unlike Joan Burbick's Healing the Republic (1994) and other path-breaking publications in the field of medical humanities, The Medical Imagination does not reference physicians' writings to make a general statement about national health or American culture: carefully researched and very readable, the book sketches out an intellectually agile and dynamic community of early American physician-writers. It sheds light on individual biographies and friendships, emphasizes generational and cross-generational connections and conversations, and carves out the political concerns of individual participants who steered the relationship between health and literature in new directions. These medical men believed in the power of narrative to either cure or cause harm, but instead of resorting to narratives of healing, they preferred to outline and discuss the relationship between art and science, "imaginative experimentation," and "reductive, mechanistic paradigms" (102). Building on a variety of contexts, and rich in detail, The Medical Imagination offers an in-depth analysis of the life and oeuvre of key figures in American medical and literary history, including Benjamin Rush,
The disease-subject as a subject of literature
Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 2007
Based on the distinction between living body and lived body, we describe the disease-subject as representing the impact of disease on the existential life-project of the subject. Traditionally, an individual's subjectivity experiences disorders of the body and describes ensuing pain, discomfort and unpleasantness. The idea of a disease-subject goes further, representing the lived body suffering existential disruption and the possible limitations that disease most probably will impose. In this limit situation, the disease-subject will have to elaborate a new life-story, a new character or wayof-being-in-the-world, it will become a different subject.
Reading the Novel: A Gothicized "Enterprise of Health
2011
I came across a line in a journal article recently that has been haunting me. A Liverpool writer Pauline Rowe, speaking of a friend and mentor who instilled in her a love of literature at an early age, describes how he taught her to "write the words of others in my heart so that, in deep crisis, they came back to save me" (Rowe 2009, 76). Rowe's depiction of words being inscribed on the heart, and travelling within the body like invited fellow-explorers, recalls Denis Donoghue's comment that sometimes, after reading, "a word, a phrase, a sentence" lingers and "presents itself as though it had broken free from its setting and declared its independence" (Donoghue 2008, 44). Drawing upon these ideas, I want to consider the notion that the simple act of reading fiction, of reading the words of another person, has the capacity to offer help and emotional sustenance in times of crisis. Any literary form has the potential to offer such a resource, but my interest in this article lies with the novel. Focusing specifically upon the Irish novel, I would like to consider the role that literature may have as a potentially tactile "enterprise of health" (Deleuze 1997, 3). Gilles Deleuze's notion of health in this instance does not refer exclusively to the physiological sense of the term. His intention is to focus upon the acts of reading and writing as means of instilling vitality and creativity into the processes of thinking. This is a form of health whose timbre is discovered in tandem with movement, invention and creation. Inspired by Nietzsche's belief that "[e]very art, every philosophy can be considered a cure and aid in the service of growing, struggling life" (Nietzsche 2008, 234), Deleuze sees philosophy entering into diverse, unpredictable and nonprivileging relationships within the spheres of art, literature, medicine and science. Like philosophers, writers are creative thinkers and if we engrave others' words in our hearts in the way Rowe recounts, so too are readers.