Changing Images of Healers

^Changing Images of Healers Carol Donley I. Images of Healers in Volume 2 Traditionally, the image of healer in our culture has meant the portrait of a white male physician. Seen ideally, he is a heroic fighter against disease and death, a skilled repairman, a compassionate comfortersomething like a knight, a magician, and a benevolent father all in one. Extremely negative images range from the quack to the patronizing, cold, and arrogant manipulator. Some of today's scholarship continues to examine images of the white male doctor as healer. The past ten years, however, have seen a shift of attention to nontraditional images of healers. Volume 2 of Literature and Medicine, Images of Healers, helped stimulate that shift by looking at images of nurses, shamans and con men, patients, family, friends, even the narrative process—all as healers.1 Physicians as Healers Although some essayists in volume 2 do look at white male doctors, they focus on a special group—those physicians who are also writers and who, therefore, ought to have the imagination to see from many perspectives . The volume is dedicated to the best-known American physicianwriter , William Carlos Williams, on the occasion of the centennial of his birth. Williams himself provided some remarkable images of healers in his poetry and prose. William Eric Williams, a pediatrician who continued his father's medical practice, provides images of his father at work, both in photographs and in reproductions of several pages from the little red notebook in which Williams, in 1914, alternated his records of the cases of mumps and impetigo in the schools with lines of his poetry. It is a pleasure to encounter his characteristic juxtaposition of lice and lyrics, his prescription pads just as likely to record a striking metaphor as to give instructions to a pharmacist.2 Literature and Medicine 10 (1991) 18-33 © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Carol Donley 19 Theodora R. Graham examines the successes and failures of Williams 's double career—of his "precarious balance" (p. 10) in trying to chase '"two hares at once'" (p. H).3 One of the themes associated with Williams is the relationship of art and science or, more specifically, of literature and medicine—a concern that appears also in Nora Crow Jaffe's essay, "A Second Opinion on Delusions and Dreams. A Reading of Freud's Interpretation of Jensen," which examines Freud's interpretation of a short German novel, Gradiva (1903), by Wilhelm Jensen. Jaffe shows that Freud was fascinated with the work but that his bias toward scientific, objective "truth" made him see fiction as delusion and art as connected to madness. Freud pursued the author with a number of questions about his childhood traumas and frustrations, which Freud felt surely must be the source of the novel, and he flatly refused to accept Jensen's explanation of the origin of the work. As Jaffe points out, Freud divided intellect (reality, science, truth) from imagination (dream, wish fulfillment, madness , illusion)—a division that denies all creative imagination to the scientist and to the doctor, who must "treat human beings in all their biological , intellectual, and emotional complexity. It takes a whole doctor to treat a whole patient" (p. 115). The division also denies reason and intellect to the artist. One wonders what Freud would have done with someone like William Carlos Williams, or with Wallace Stevens, who combined vocations in insurance and poetry. A question raised often at interdisciplinary conferences in the past decade is whether writing talent gives a physician a better way of seeing—or whether diagnostic ability helps make a better writer. What, if any, are the genuine connections between the writer and the physician? Does writing sensitize the physician to the social, psychological, and moral contexts of the patient? Not necessarily, as Suzanne Poirier indicates in her essay "The Physician and Authority: Portraits by Four Physician-Writers." Poirier examines physician-patient relationships in the fiction of S. Weir Mitchell, Richard Selzer, and Walker Percy, as well as Williams. Their portraits of physicians range from "absolute dictator to unwilling participant in the healing process" (p. 21). One of her most important points is that "to Williams knowledge comes only...