Pairing Literature and Medicine

^Pairing Literature and Medicine Lilian R. Fürst Fictive Ills: Literary Perspectives on Wounds and Diseases is the subtitle of volume 9 of Literature and Medicine.1 As its coeditors, Peter W. Graham and Elizabeth Sewell, explain in their introduction, their idea was to examine Uterary works that have a wound or a disease as the "true hero of the tale"—that is, as its epicenter. The idea seems natural for this series. What is most distinctive and ingenious about volume 9 is the way in which this idea has been carried out. Each text has a pair of commentators with different academic backgrounds, one in the medical sciences, the other in the humanities. Except in one instance, in which two colleagues at the same institution exchanged ideas, the aim was a "noncollaborative collaboration," the juxtaposition of two discrete views of the same problem . In two cases, the notion of pairing has been taken a step further by coupling the works under consideration according to the similarity of their subjects: Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych and Tillie Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle" are paired as scripts for dying, and Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" as records of nervous breakdown. So the collection comprises sixteen essays on ten portrayals of fictive ills. In those instances where the dual commentaries lead to some repetition—as they do when both interpreters invoke the same biographical data—the effect is unobtrusive, as the interpreters generally adduce the information to serve different ends. The editors have taken great care not only to achieve an equal representation of the sexes among the essayists, but also, where possible, to have a male essayist address markedly female subject matter (e.g., "The Yellow Wallpaper "), and vice versa. The outcome of this forethought and judicious balancing is a volume of striking originality, studded with stimulating insights and provocative in the ulterior questions it impUcitly raises about the interface of uterature and medicine. If Fictive Ills is taken primarily as an experiment in a method of approach, then the choice of texts becomes almost a secondary considLiterature and Medicine 10 (1991) 130-142 © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Lilian R. Fürst 131 eration. Because of their striving for variety, the editors express a number of regrets about their final selection: the dominance of diseases over wounds (one), the lack of poetry, the abandonment of Camus's The Plague as too allegorical, and the absence of such obvious candidates for inclusion as De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Wagner's Parsifal, not to mention Kafka's A Country Doctor, with its fascinating (and perhaps allegorical) wound. Here I can only cite the German proverb Wer die Wahl hat, hat die Qual: "Who has the choice, has the torture." The roughly chronological sequence of the arrangement tends to underscore the preponderance of nineteenth-century texts. However, once the works examined are envisaged as exemplary and not necessarily representative, objections as well as regrets lose much of their force. What is central is not the choice but the innovative methodology. Any assessment of this volume must therefore center on the outcome of this approach. Do the pairings produce any discernible patterns to iUuminate the relationship of literature and medicine? No single answer, certainly no schematic answer, can be given. Often, the paired commentators focus on the same feature, yet interpret it in diverse, at times diametrically opposite, ways. It is precisely this complex interplay of coincidence and divergence that makes for the fascination of Fictive Ills and that forces us to consider the challenging issues it raises. The first pair of comments, devoted to the Philoctetes of Sophocles, already reveals the fruitfulness of the approach. Drew Leder, a physician who teaches in a department of philosophy and who is interested in the phenomenology of medicine, envisages Philoctetes' wound as a mark that exiles him from his body, from the social world, and indeed from the cosmos. Since he has incurred the wound by violating the divine order by coming too...