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-SkEditor's Column ^sThe rich diversity of work in this second general issue of Literature and Medicine fulfills our best hopes for the journal's success as a semiannual publication. The essays here deal with literary works ranging from nineteenth-century British and American narratives to recent feminist utopias set far in the future. Some of the works—Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and Richard Selzer's stories—will be familiar to many of our readers. Others—Fanny Burney's "Narrative of the Last Illness and Death of General d'Arblay," Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale—may be new to them. Yet even among the diverse texts and scholarly approaches represented here, thematic resonances echo subtly from essay to essay. Stephanie P. Browner opens this issue with a reconsideration of one of the canonical works of American literature. In her essay, "Authorizing the Body: Scientific Medicine and The Scarlet Letter," she maintains that The Scarlet Letter offers "a pointed critique that goes to the very center of nineteenth-century medical science—its claims to social authority and its political appropriation of the body" (p. 140). Drawing on the history of medicine, Browner argues that in this romance Hawthorne rejects nineteenth-century medicine's emphasis on observation and demonstrates in his narrative strategy the superiority of literature's competing epistemology—interpretation. Truth, according to Hawthorne , is to be found not on surfaces but in interiors, not in signs but in interpretations, not in literal readings but in symbolic meanings. Thus, simply to condemn Hester Prynne by equating the A inscribed on her chest with Adulteress would be to miss the "moral ambiguities" and "psychological complexities" (p. 151) that lie beneath the surface and to underestimate the radical challenge to patriarchal social authority that Prynne's untamed female body represents. Browner concludes by insisting on the dynamic tension between Hawthorne's claim for the superior authority of literature and language to tame Prynne's body and his "true desire to represent and celebrate the subversive possibilities of the body" (p. 158). Questions about the social control of women's bodies are also central to the novels discussed in this issue's second essay, Robert Shelton's Literature and Medicine 12, no. 2 (Fall 1993) vii-x © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press EDITOR'S COLUMN "The Social Text as Body: Images of Health and Disease in Three Recent Feminist Utopias." In these feminist utopias (or dystopias), questions about gender inevitably lead to or intersect with questions about health, both individual and social. Shelton begins by arguing that the concepts of utopia and dystopia, like those of health and disease, are inherently asymmetrical. Then he uses two analogies —"Utopia is to health as dystopia is to disease" and "Health is to disease as utopia is to dystopia" (p. 162)—to structure his analyses of Russ's The Female Man, Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It is the second analogy, he claims, that "leads to the core issues (of order versus freedom) about the structure of society and the efficacy of medical science " (p. 167). This essay will not only introduce our readers to works they may not know but also lead them to rethink the concepts of health and disease. Read together, Browner's and Shelton's essays enhance each other by showing how powerfully questions of social control of the female body persist from one era to another, from past through present to future. In the third essay of this issue, "The Art of the Suture: Richard Selzer and Medical Narrative," Robert Leigh Davis uses the concept of suturing—literally, the surgical technique of closing wounds—to analyze textual closure in Selzer's writing. As a surgeon, Selzer routinely healed patients by suturing their wounds; as a writer, Davis argues, Selzer strives to heal by suturing medical narratives, by "closing off uncertainty and restoring a sense of continuity and shared meaning" (p. 178). Yet Selzer is aware of the danger of closure, of the stillness that...

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