Literature and Medicine: An Annotated Bibliography (review)

258 BOOK REVIEWS likely to be ready to join the fray. Levertov assumes the value of the study of literature by medical students and the need for doctors to avoid detaching "words and ideas from their roots in feeling and image" (p. 154)—"patient" is her example. But these, she believes, are obvious truths and do not constitute a "field of thought and endeavor" or even a "theme." My own guess is that there will not be anything like a "literature of medicine" in the same sense that there is a "history of . . ." or a "philosophy of medicine." No one will be able to limit the use of literature either to a fixed canon or to a purely reportorial role. Like the practitioners of family medicine, we are looking for a theoretical justification for a pedagogical and pragmatic activity that has already met with success. That literary people do not "do literature" in the same sense as historians "do history" suggests that what we will have will be a "literary-criticism of medicine," a value-laden examination of the human interactions and the individual consciousnesses that are at the core of the medical task, the doctor-patient relationship. Medicine struggles with the human condition, literature with its meaning. In the twentieth century we lack a cosmology— magic, religion—that might relate the two more precisely. Whether an intellectual or a critical enterprise may substitute remains to be seen. Healing Arts in Dialogue captures much of what it must have been like to explore this question near its beginning. The dialogue Joanne Trautmann created and then recreated for us ought to stimulate a wider discussion of what it is that literature-and-medicine may be. —Kathryn Montgomery Hunter School of Medicine and Dentistry University of Rochester Joanne Trautmann and Carol Pollard. Literature and Medicine: An Annotated Bibliography. Revised Edition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. 228 pp. $19.95. Compilers of annotated bibliographies are among the thankless scholars in the academic community. We all profit from the fruits of their labors, but we don't want to admit it openly, and we surely don't want to give them much credit or recognition. Yet without them most of us would have a difficult time researching a problem or designing a syllabus. Try, for instance, to conjure up 1,396 respectable literary works from classical times to the present dealing with one or more of thirty-nine medical issues or topics ranging (alphabetically) from "abortion" to "women Book Reviews 159 as patients." No mean task, to be sure, but this is precisely what Professor Joanne Trautmann, who has been one of the leaders in the field of literature and medicine, and her co-worker Carol Pollard have done for us, and I, for one whose copy of the original edition of their book is falling apart from constant use, want to thank them for the timely publication of their revised edition. Inevitably, a revised edition invites comparisons with the original one. In this case, the original was paperbound; the revised is clothbound, and it's a sturdier and larger book (24 cm. X 31 cm.). The basic principles for selection of titles and the format for their arrangement, however, are the same in both editions. According to Trautmann and Pollard, the works included are either good literature, or they illuminate in some significant way one or more of the thirty-nine medical topics the compilers are interested in. Except for classical authors, the compilers have given preference to works written in English, French, German, Russian, Italian, and Spanish, respectively. The works cited are representative ones and do not necessarily include all those dealing with medical topics that a given author has published. Authors and their works are arranged chronologically from classical to twentieth century. The revised edition contains a few works in the chronological sections not found in the original edition. The revised edition has a new section after the twentieth-century section in which eighty-four new authors and their works appear, all (except two) representing the twentieth century. In this new section, the compilers, while retaining the spirit of their original principles for inclusion, have made a conscientious effort to...