Editor's Column

Editor's Column We chose "Images of Healers" as the theme for the second volume of Literature and Medicine because studying images of healers is a rich and traditional approach to literature and medicine. We chose "healers" rather than "physicians" because physicians are only one kind of healer, and we wanted to include studies of other kinds of healers also. And we agreed to consider "literature" in its broadest sense so that we might include studies of film and popular culture as well as studies of poetry and fiction. Happily, among the many essays submitted, we found the variety we had hoped for. Volume Two offers studies of many kinds of healers—physicians, surgeons, shamans, conjure men (and con men), nurses, psychoanalysts, lovers, and writers—in many kinds of literaturepoetry , fiction, essays, folktales, blues songs, film, television, and even postage stamps. Our 1983 volume is dedicated to William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), honoring the centennial year of his birth. One of the best known American physician-writers, William Carlos Williams lived the conjunction of literature and medicine that this journal is devoted to studying. Volume Two begins with a section about Williams's life and work, including a special cameo of him, written by his son William Eric Williams, also a physician, who continues the practice that his father began in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1910. Accompanying the cameo are photographs of four pages from the notebook Williams kept when he was a school physician. On the pages of this notebook, as in all of his life, medicine and literature are interwoven—one leading inevitably to the other and back again. In her special commemorative essay about Williams, Theodora R. Graham demonstrates the courage of this diversity that enriched Williams's work as both physician and poet. If William Carlos Williams was an unusual physician because he was an excellent writer as well, he was, nonetheless, a traditional physicianhealer . So too are the physician-characters about whom he wrote. Suzanne Poirier considers them and other traditional physician-healers in her essay on the physician and authority. Using physician-characters created by four EDITOR'S COLUMN physician-writers—S. Weir Mitchell, Williams, Richard Selzer, and Walker Percy—she shows a progressive development from the authoritarian physician of the early twentieth century to the physician as unwilling healer in contemporary fiction. She correlates these changes in the image of physician-healers with changes in societal values and medical ethics. Richard Selzer's awareness of the relation between rituals of contemporary surgeons and those of ancient shamans forms the basis for his essay, "My Brother Shaman." His reflections help bridge the gap between the traditional (white male) physicians Poirier considers and the black conjure men (or con men) that Loudell F. Snow discusses in her essay about healers in the black ghetto. A cultural anthropologist, Snow draws upon many sources—folktales, blues songs, newspaper advertisements, and contemporary Afro-American poetry and fiction—for the images of black healers she presents. Nurses, too, are healers, and two essays in this volume examine their images. First, Leslie A. Fiedler considers nurses in English and American literature and in popular culture, and offers explanation for their stereotyped images as women who evoke in men both erotic fantasies and fears of castration. Inci A. Bowman's visual essay complements Fiedler 's study. In contrast with the usually unfavorable images of nurses in literature and popular culture, the government-sanctioned public images of nurses on postage stamps are idealized and highly favorable. Lovers and writers can also be healers. Freud's analysis of Jensen's novel Gradiva demonstrates both the value of literature to the development of psychiatry and the superiority of lover to psychoanalyst as therapisthealer . In her second opinion, Nora Crow Jaffe calls into question Freud's interpretation of the novel and in so doing points to the importance of maintaining life-affirming illusions. In his essay on Grace Paley's "A Conversation with my Father," D. S. Neff studies just such illusions, as he discusses Paley's characters, a physician and a writer, father and daughter, who debate their views of life and art, reflecting their different styles of healing. Finally, healers can become patients...