The Body and the Text: Comparative Essays in Literature and Medicine (review)

5^ Book Reviews Bruce Clarke and Wendell Aycock, eds. The Body and the Text: Comparative Essays in Literature and Medicine. Studies in Comparative Literature, no. 22. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1990. χ + 222 pp. Clothbound, $24.95; paperback, $12.95. Academics are typically thought-absorbed as they clamber up abstraction ladders and into the clouds of concepts, precepts, and manuscript acceptances. Scholars, it seems, flee the body and yearn for disincarnation, at least in their professional pursuits. Regrettably, concerns of the body are rarely considered in the American or European college or university. Indeed, we often separate such concerns away from ideas, equations, and paradigms. In America, we relegate them to the P.E. department in general and to sports teams in particular. With the exception of the gross-anatomy lab in med schools, academics generally ignore the facts and importance of the human body, almost as if human beings existed somewhere else — on the pages of texts or the screens of computers. Into this conceptual vacuum drops this welcome collection from Texas Tech, courtesy of a series Studies in Comparative Literature. These papers are from a 1989 conference; the topic was "Literature and Medicine ." The discipUne of comparative uterature provides an appropriate perspective, since its vision ranges through time (ancients through moderns ) and space (literature from around the world), and its methodologies are synthetic and imaginative. Editors Clarke and Aycock have selected fourteen intelügent and well-turned essays, which they have grouped into three sections. The first, logicaUy enough, is "History, Theory, and Pedagogy." The three essays in this section situate us conceptually and offer some practical appUcations for teaching as well. Anne Hudson Jones charts three standard ways of looking at the relationship between literature and medicine: themes of illness, suffering, and death; images of healers; physician-writers—the kinds of categories that teachers and scholars will find useful. The fourth approach she describes is more recent and more controversial: Uterature as a mode of heaUng, in which literature complements or even rivals medicine. In genLiterature and Medicine 10 (1991) 162-181 © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Book Reviews 163 eral, Jones finds that Uterature is taught in medical schools "to make [students] better doctors" (p. 18). One way to do this is the "ethical approach" (finding ethical questions within texts); another is the "aesthetic approach" (focusing on interpretation). These strands come together in the most recent approach, narrative ethics. Literature itself is a healer of bodies. For William Monroe, text becomes kinetic at the point of performance, when a person reads and experiences a text, not just as an escapist novelty, but as a necessity for being human and part of the social web that we all share. In medical situations, patient and care-giver "perform" together in crafting a script that is both heuristic and healing. (Strictly scientific language misses this crucial collaboration.) And Uterature can aid medical training by increasing the sensitivity of physicians to such questions. John Woodcock, agreeing that the duty of Uterature is to make better physicians, sees a further issue in the "complex considerations of the multiple nature of reality" (p. 45). Within the safety of the aesthetic frame, medical students can increase their empathy, imagination, and tolerance for ambiguity before they put their minds and hands to particular patients. In closing, Woodcock discusses specific examples of texts he has used with his students and some informal experiments he has made in his teaching. Even at the level of theory, Uterature is "performed" in particular classrooms and with particular persons. Part Two, "Comparative Literature and Medicine," turns to particular instances of the body as explored through uterary art. Sidney Monas provides a speculative note in his creative essay, which celebrates the body in Rabelais, Tolstoi, and Joyce. His essayistic approach, to recall Monroe above, is performative. He reminds us that Rabelais was a physician and that Joyce had medical training, and he traces the ways these writers bring language, wit, and love to aspects of the human frame. Tolstoi, also, celebrates the body in love, naturaUy, but also even in death. Earthiness, corporeaUty, food, and sexuaUty, Monas finds, are all central to humanity as explored by these authors...