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Reviewed by:
  • Medicine and Western Civilization
  • Lois N. Magner
David J. Rothman, Steven Marcus, and Stephanie A. Kiceluk, eds. Medicine and Western Civilization. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. xiii + 443 pp. Ill. $50.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paperbound).

Having often struggled to find appropriate readings for my undergraduate courses, I was glad to be able to test Medicine and Western Civilization in my history of medicine survey course this semester. It provides a wide-ranging collection of readings that will be welcomed by many of those who are teaching courses in the history of medicine or the medical humanities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and in professional schools. The major question for many teachers will be whether this anthology will be more useful than Logan Clendening’s venerable Source Book of Medical History (1942; reissued by Dover, 1960). Clendening drew on a solid tradition of anthologies of original contributions in the field of medicine. However, he also included literary selections from Aristophanes to Dickens, to provide an external view of medical life in different periods. Brief introductory notes preceded each selection. The organization was roughly chronological, but the selections were also divided according to themes, such as anatomy, medical life, asepsis, bacteriology, therapeutics, clinical descriptions, and the rise of the specialties. Clendening provided some references for further readings; unfortunately, Medicine and Western Civilization does not, but it does supply a useful interpretive framework and twenty-six illustrations.

The editors have limited their anthology to “Western Civilization” and what is generally called “orthodox” medicine. While this is understandable, I regret that they did not make room for some selections offering insight into “non-Western” cultures and “alternative” medicine. A global perspective is really an essential [End Page 569] part of education, and the history of medicine provides an area where international and intercultural comparisons can be very enlightening.

In their eight-page introduction, the editors state that their aim is to “illustrate and to illuminate the many ways in which medicine and culture combine to shape our values and traditions” (p. 1). They consider medicine and culture to be both inseparable entities and a complex set of worlds. They emphasize that medicine “has been a vital source of authority in Western societies” since Greco-Roman times and has “acquired the power to demarcate the line between the normal and the abnormal, the biologically innate and the culturally determined, between male and female, life and death” (p. 1). The examination of notable literary, medical, and social texts should, therefore, provide the best method for sorting out the complex interplay between medicine and culture.

The book is divided into nine parts according to major themes: (1) the human form divine; (2) the body secularized; (3) anatomy and destiny; (4) psyche and soma; (5) the contaminated and the pure; (6) the healer; (7) the experimenter; (8) the institutionalization of physicians and patients; and (9) the construction of pain, suffering, and death. It has not been organized as a conventional survey of the history of medicine or a “compendium of literary accounts of medicine” (p. 3). This thematic organization presents some difficulties if one wishes to use the book in a general survey. Although the themes are certainly of great interest, the lack of any chronological framework was disturbing to many of my students. Nevertheless, most of them have reacted favorably to the anthology and welcomed the opportunity to read selections from works they would not otherwise experience directly.

Clendening’s Source Book ends with Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s “On a New Kind of Ray,” a scientific report from 1895 that literally led to a new way of envisioning the body. In contrast, Medicine and Western Civilization ends with a poem by Philip Larkin. With the “housecall” at least as foreign to most students as “venesection,” the last line of “Aubade” may strike younger readers as strange indeed: “Postmen like doctors go from house to house” (p. 436).

Lois N. Magner
Purdue University
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