Winged Words and Chief Complaints: Medical Case Histories and the Parry-Lord Oral-Formulaic Tradition

^Winged Words and Chief Complaints: Medical Case Histories and the Parry-Lord Oral-Formulaic Tradition Richard M. Ratzan . . . the picture that emerges is not really one of conflict between preserver of tradition and creative artists; it is rather one of the preservation of tradition by the constant re-creation of it. The ideal is a true story well and truly re-told.1 Imagine the following story: A very young man who is a renowned warrior enlists with the Greek army attacking Troy. This warrior has been told by his divine mother that he has one of two fates in store for him—either a very long, peaceful life or one shortened by death in battle but lengthened by immortal glory. The commander-in-chief publicly insults and humiliates the warrior by stripping him of a slave girl the warrior has rightfully won as part of his spoils from the ongoing war. The warrior retreats to his camp, depriving the commander-in-chief not * I would like to dedicate this paper to the memory of my teacher, James A. Notopoulos, a Homeric scholar who taught his students that life was more than the κλÎμα ανδϕ ών. It was poetry itself. Many people and institutions were of great help to me during the long gestation of this paper. In her typically unselfish and effective fashion, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins midwifed an often unwilling and cranky parent, for which I offer much thanks. Norman Austin and my fellow participants in his 1990 National Endowment for the Humanities Homer Institute influenced this paper in ways they can never know. I will always be in the debt of Larry Schneiderman and to his patient for her "true" story of angina that was brought on by reaching for the pear in her pear tree. John Brennan made many suggestions that were, like all good suggestions, as useful when they ultimately proved unhelpful as otherwise. The staffs of the libraries of the University of Arizona, the University of Connecticut, and Trinity College were very generous in their support and collections. Literature and Medicine 11, no. 1 (Spring 1992) 94-114 © 1992 by Richard M. Ratzan Richard M. Ratzan 95 only of his personal troops but also of his own participation, a role recognized by the entire Greek army as indispensable to a Greek victory over Troy. After several days of a crushing Trojan assault with many casualties, an unsuccessful attempt by the commander to reconcile the warrior with the offer of the original slave girl, and much, much more in the way of tribute and booty, a counselor of the commander-in-chief prevails upon the warrior's best friend to rejoin the war effort. The friend does so and meets his death at the hands of a Trojan warrior corresponding in heroic stature to the Greek warrior sulking in his tent. The latter is devastated with grief, at least as much grief as the anger he felt at the beginning of the story. He reenters the battle, slaughters literally scores of Trojans, and finally kills the warrior who vanquished his best friend. After dragging the body of his dead foe around the city of Troy to humiliate him, he receives a visit from the slain warrior's father, who he knows is on this mission at the encouragement of the gods. The old man beseeches him to return the body. The Greek warrior does so and the story is over. The story, of course, is the Iliad; the warrior, Achilles. But why discuss Achilles in a paper on medical case histories? The answer is oral narrative. Both the Iliad and every patient's narrative have their origins in an oral story. The recent interest in the role of patients' narratives in medicine has unfortunately focused all too often on methodologies and metaphors more applicable to written texts than to oral ones. In this essay I shall compare patients' medical case histories, as retold by the physician, with the Parry-Lord exposition of the oral-formulaic tradition. In so doing I shall also suggest that another vantage point from which to view patient narratives is that of oral literature.2 Milman Parry and the Oral-Formulaic Theory Many ancient and...