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The courage of his diversity: medicine, writing and William Carlos Williams Theodora R. Graham The relationship between physician and patient, if it were literally followed, would give us a world of extraordinary fertility of the imagination which we can hardly afford. There's no use multiplying cases, it is there, it is magnificent, it fills my thoughts . . .' This issue of Literature and Medicine celebrates the centennial of William Carlos Williams' birth on September 17, 1883. Its focus on images of healers in literature is particularly apt, for the central character in Williams' writing is frequently an autobiographical projection of the physician -poet engaged in a dual relationship with his patients. "My business," he asserts in the Autobiography, "aside from the mere physical diagnosis, is to make a different sort of diagnosis concerning them as individuals, quite apart from anything for which they seek my advice" (A, 358). Rather than distance him from a patient, this fascination with the· other story in the case history involved him beyond the application of his considerable medical skill. As he told John Gerber in a 1950 interview: "It was always important to me to go through the somatic part of medicine into the psychic part, which is verse, which is art, all the way through."2 Williams could write lyrically about this interweaving of medicine and art. The poem springs from the half-spoken words of such patients as the physician sees from day to day. He observes it in the peculiar, actual conformations in which its life is hid. Humbly he presents himself before it and by long practice he strives as best All quotations from the works of William Carlos Williams are used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. 10 THE COURAGE OF HIS DIVERSITY he can to interpret the manner of its speech. In that the secret lies. This, in the end, comes perhaps to be the occupation of the physician after a lifetime of careful listening. (A, 362) Yet it is important in studying his self-portraits not to underestimate the tension between these two careers, not to accept uncritically his more sanguine statements about their complementarity or to romanticize the delicate and at times precarious balance existing between them. This essay attempts to point out the sources of tension, as both biography and art reveal them, with the purpose of defining as a continuing process what Joanne Trautmann has referred to as Williams' "fused sensibility."3 In a humorous vein Williams was "Le Médecin Malgré Lui" of his 1918 poem.4 Here the doctor's reluctance stems not from the practice of medicine but from the kind of discipline and social role his "Lady Happiness"—and perhaps colleagues and patients—would have him impose upon himself. He should wash the office walls, polish rust from instruments, empty and clean stain bottles, set accumulated journals on edge and catalogue useful articles. What's more, he should grow a decent beard and cultivate "a look / of importance . . . ." Is the "Lady" this would do credit to Flossie, then his wife of six years, as Reed Whittemore suggests?5 The success model this "Happiness" holds before him is one of order and propriety, getting on, being respectable and respected. But the speaker's language—"Oh I suppose I should"—signals his recalcitrance. Williams never grew the beard and, as Kora in Hell attests, his thoughts during the late teens were decidedly not the "white" ones the lady favors. His practice—among upper-middle class Rutherford residents, as well as among working class families from surrounding industrial towns—was solid but never lucrative.6 In fact he favored socialized medicine and despised "[djoctors who practice medicine for money and not for humanity . . . who have just wanted to keep the price of medicine up so that they get their divvy."7 It was bread, not caviar, the doctor sought, a modest income to provide the stability and freedom he required to write intimately about his locale and its people. His fellow Rutherfordians were unlikely to understand this need to follow two careers: A wonderful gift! How do you find the time for it in your busy life? It must be a great thing...

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