Healing Arts in Dialogue: Medicine and Literature (review)

Book Reviews 155 order, also challenges Roueché's detectives. In "Two Blue Hands" what looks like cyanosis proves to be a red herring. In "Sandy" a popular elementary-school student falls ill and inadvertently engenders a hysterical epidemic that, due to a series of coincidences, plausibly presents itself as gas poisoning. Throughout this collection the medical investigator who sets out to decipher a public or private riddle generally succeeds. Two of the most recent essays, however, show how serious the consequences can be when the detective we call a doctor falls into error. "Empty as Eve" (1974) tells the poignant story of a professional woman who, having undergone electroshock treatment for depression caused by unsuccessful peridontic surgery, must herself become a detective searching, with only partial success, for the past she has lost to shock therapy. "Live and Let Live" (1979) offers the yet more harrowing account of a young woman suffering from Wilson's disease (a genetic derangement of the body's ability to metabolize copper) and manifesting classic symptoms (progressive clumsiness , drooling, slurred speech, the distinctive Kayser-Fleischer corneal rings) yet shunted as an intractable neurotic from psychiatrist to unperceptive psychiatrist. In these two pieces Roueché succeeds in presenting humanitarian insight without lapsing from reportorial objectivity: no small feat. —Peter W. Graham Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Trautmann, Joanne, editor. Healing Arts in Dialogue: Medicine and Literature (Medical Humanities series). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981. xix + 178 pp. $16.95. Healing Arts in Dialogue is the record of a series of five meetings held in 1975 and 1976 by the Institute on Human Values in Medicine, one of four such serial conferences designed to consider the relationship of non-scientific disciplines to medicine. Joanne Trautmann, Professor of Humanities at the Hershey Medical Center of Pennsylvania State University , brought together a disparate group interested in very different ways in the relationship, real and potential, between medicine and literature . Many of the participants have double or interdisciplinary careers. They include Nancy C. Andreasen, a psychiatrist who has been an English 256 BOOK REVIEWS professor; James C. Cowan, a D. H. Lawrence scholar with an inevitable interest in psychology and the body; Ian Lawson, an internist interested in language use; Denise Levertov, a nurse before her recognition as a poet; Harold Gene Moss, who taught in the departments of English and community health at the University of Horida before going to the National Endowment for the Humanities; William B. Ober, a pathologist and author of Boswell's Clap and Other Essays; Richard Selzer, a surgeon and short story writer; Elizabeth Sewell, a poet and critic interested in magic and the power of the imagination; and the convener, Joanne Trautmann, the editor with Nigel Nicholson of the Letters of Virginia Woolf and, as the first professor of literature and medicine, the pioneer in the field. But is it a field? Are literature and medicine, taken together, an intellectual discipline? A "tenth dialogist," whom Trautmann wisely does not expunge, leaves the group after the first meeting, saying: "'and' is a neutral word. You can link anything and anything else, and pretend for awhile that you have a subject, but do you really have one?" Was he or she a doctor? a poet? or, more likely, a teacher of literature? We don't know. But the question remains behind. The book, of course, like the dialogue, is an attempt to answer this question, and its unorthodox form is appropriate for such an exploratory venture. This is not a stuffy "proceedings." Chunks of transcribed dialogue are interspersed with the dialogists' essays and stories and poems, the editor's summaries of responses and arguments, and letters that record thoughts in between meetings. Conversational arrows and footnotes point outward: William Ober's essay on the spleen as organ and melancholic ailment is not included; Richard Selzer's story "The Abortion" and Denise Levertov's essay on Anne Sexton's madness are discussed but printed elsewhere. Much of the discussion concerns madness, although it is clear that several of the participants would have preferred moving on to an epistemology of the body or to the relation of magic, literature, and healing. The conference method restores "essay...