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Book Reviews 175 Richard Selzer, Imagine a Woman and Other Tales. New York: Random House, 1990. 229 pp. Clothbound, $18.95. When Richard Selzer became a writer, he did so in order "to search for some meaning in the ritual of surgery, which is at once murderous, painful, healing, and full of love ... a devilish hard thing to transmit— to find, even" (Mortal Lessons, p. 15). His search focused upon the work and Ufe of the physician and led him to discover and to reveal truths about doctors that challenge and undermine the dominant American image of physicians as figures of superhuman power and knowledge by revealing that doctors are no more and no less than human beings who suffer, fear, and need spiritual heaUng as desperately as the patients upon whom they practice. When Selzer has considered other aspects of medicine, he has almost always focused upon those moments in life in which pain and beauty illuminate the particular physical and symboUc acts of particular patients, onlookers, and care-givers facing sickness, death, and recovery. "Mora üsts," Selzer has written, "generalize with eloquence upon the masses; poets have always succumbed to the pathos of single happenings. I do not write about socialized medicine or medical ethics. I do not, must not, extend my artistic scope to include all my human concerns. It would but negate and weaken whatever force my art does possess." (I am quoting from a set of notes from which Selzer draws material for many of his speeches; I acquired copies of these notes when I first met him, in April 1984, in New Haven.) With the pubUcation of Imagine a Woman and Other Tales, this is no longer the case. At least four of the book's six stories depict "single happenings" that both illuminate the Uves of the characters involved and strongly invite the reader to connect that iUumination to the more general concerns of the medical humanities. In these stories, Selzer offers representations of heaUng in which the power of contemporary medicine is nullified, becomes irrelevant, or constitutes the very source of sickness. Imagine a Woman is thus an important contribution to the discourse of the medical humanities and one of the most compelUng coUections of stories with medical themes to appear in a good while. "Whither Thou Goest," "Imagine a Woman," and "Luis" wiU serve as illustrations. "Whither Thou Goest," originally published in the September 1990 issue of Redbook under the unfortunate title "Follow Your Heart," is the most striking story in Imagine a Woman. It is about Hannah Owen, a widow whose husband, Sam, is killed by a buUet to the brain. His organs— corneas, kidneys, liver, lungs, and heart—are harvested and transplanted 176 BOOK REVIEWS into seven people around the state of Texas. Three years after his death, however, Hannah cannot let him go. She locates the recipient of the heart and arranges, after a long and wonderful series of letters, to spend an hour with her ear to his chest. "She listened and received the deep regular beat, the emphatic lub-dup, lub-dup to which with all her own heart she surrendered. Almost at once, she felt a sense of comfort that she had not known in three years. She could have stayed there forever, bathed in the sound and touch of that heart" (p. 27). When her hour is done, Hannah can return to her home "with the certainty that she had at last been retrieved from the shadows and set down once more upon the bright lip of her life" (p. 28). "Whither Thou Goest" is at once an absolutely unique fictional creation , a "single happening," and an invitation to examine the iatrogenic potential of contemporary medicine and its miracles. Early in the story, Hannah observes that doctors "don't think. They just do, and cover it all up with language. Harvest. Transplantation. The soft words of husbandry and the soil. Even they cannot bear to speak the real names of their deeds— dismemberment, evisceration" (p. 7). Even as he provides cures for seven deserving patients, the physician's words create an illness within Hannah that lies beyond his power. The book's title piece...

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