Editors' Column

^Editors' Column For the first time since this journal began publication seven years ago, half of the authors represented in this volume on bioethics and literature hold M.D. degrees. Furthermore, four of the essays are coauthored , with the most frequent collaboration being between an M.D. and a literary scholar. We make these observations because Literature and Mediane is an interdisciplinary journal, but in the past the majority of essays published in our volumes have been written by literary, historical, or philosophical scholars. That the essays published in this volume now represent at least equal participation by the medical community indicates to the volume co-editors, one of whom is a Ph.D. and the other an M.D., that the topic for this particular volume and our efforts over the years to foster interdisciplinary scholarship have borne fruit. We hope that these and similar collaborative scholarly efforts will continue successfully in the future and lead to more informed insight for both the medical and nonmedical communities. The dozen essays in this volume may be viewed as organized into five thematic units. The first unit contains James Terry and Peter Williams's piece, a collaborative effort by a historian and a philosopher-lawyer, providing an overview of the subject of bioethics and literature and articulating the advantages and disadvantages of using literature to teach or raise bioethical issues. The second unit contains two essays about texts that raise bioethical issues. The first piece, by Edmund and Alice Pellegrino , offers a new translation of an ancient Roman text by Scribonius Largus and analyzes the humanistic and ethical implications of Scribonius 's commentary on medicine. In his essay, Chester Burns shows how an analysis of seven American novelists—Howells, Cable, Jewett, Eggleston , Herrick, Phelps, and Burnham—can illuminate our understanding of the social history of medical ethics in the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As a complement to these historical essays, we offer a set of historical illustrations reproduced from texts in the Special Collections of the University of Delaware Library. Kathryn Hunter's essay, which may be considered to constitute the third unit of the volume, analyzes the issues involved in the controversy published in Volume 5 between David Barnard and Eric Rabkin concerning the role of narrative in the communication of the individual medical case history. EDITORS' COLUMN The largest number of essays appears in the fourth unit. All of the essays in this unit deal with the role of the physician in works in which physicians or medicine are important subjects. The essay by Hans-Peter Breuer traces the roots of guilt and responsibility in a novel by a Japanese writer and deals in part with an actual event near the end of World War Πin which several American navy pilots who were captured by the Japanese were systematically vivisected and experimented upon in the medical school hospital of a Japanese university. Teo Forcht Dagi analyzes the ethical implications of the problem of role ambiguity for physicians portrayed in short stories by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov and Pearl S. Buck. Two physicians, Janice Willms and Henry Schneiderman, assess the medical implications of two famous impaired physicians in fiction— Wolfe's Dr. McGuire and Williams's Doc Rivers. Focusing on narratives by Lewis Thomas and Oliver Sacks, Alice Budge and Emil Dickstein consider the bioethical dilemmas reflected in narratives about doctors as patients. In her discussion of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Renate Justin assesses the conflict of interest between medicine as business and patient welfare. Edmund Erde's essay focuses not on written works but on four films that he uses to illuminate some bioethical issues, especially ones regarding the way in which physicians are portrayed as heroes. The fifth thematic unit in the volume presents two essays that discuss the bioethical implications of literary works not specifically concerned with medical subjects. Edward Waldron explains how to use Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men to teach the concept of duty to medical students. Ruth Netscher demonstrates how Jonson's The Alchemist deals in part with the ethical perplexities involved in the uses of persuasion and authority in ways analogous to those...