The Body in the Library: A Literary Anthology of Modern Medicine (review)

For those of us who teach those increasingly ubiquitous medical humanities courses, collections of prose and poetry about medicine are welcome. This new addition to the genre has two great virtues: it includes a number of the "bricks" in modern literature, and it introduces fresh material from outside the English- and French-speaking canon. The seventy items—essays, poems, short stories, and excerpts—are arranged in roughly chronological order from 1807 to 2003. They are short, most being less than ten pages—an appropriate length for restless medical students and their busy teachers. Each is introduced by a paragraph about the author with comments on the passage that follows.

Physician-writers are among the group assembled here—not because they are doctors, writes Iain Bamforth, but because they are talented authors who also happened to be medically trained. Among the well-known chestnuts are excerpts from Dickens, Laennec, Fanny Burney, Eliot, Flaubert, Daudet, Osler, Williams, Camus, Sacks, and Sontag. Providing an international dimension, other "big names" are included, such as the philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and famous writers of fiction from Australia, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, and the former Soviet Union. The longest item is twenty-three pages taken from the poignant daily diary of Miguel Torga, a previously unknown (to me) Portuguese specialist in diseases of the ear, nose, and throat.

Bamforth is a physician who has won awards for his poetry and essays. He now lives in Strasbourg, having "worked across Europe and Australia" (flyleaf). Testifying to his astonishing erudition, many passages are identified as his own translations from the original French, German, Portuguese, Russian, or Danish. His collection aspires to being more than an anthology: it has a theme. The thesis, explained in a historical introduction, is that "the body was discreetly removed from the library long ago; it is the library in the body which is now our preoccupation" (p. xxiv). In other words, this collection strives to document the rise of modern technology and the unfortunate attendant losses for medical art and practice. (Scarcely surprisingly, then, we find something by George Orwell and an obituary of Ivan Illich.) Most of the long introduction is devoted to a particular overview of two centuries of medical history, which relies heavily on a somewhat garrulous condensation of Roy Porter and Walter Alvarez. Possibly it will be of use to nonhistorian users, but this reader wishes that Bamforth had chosen instead to describe his own voyage of discovery and his personal reasons for selecting the passages in his collection. The introductory paragraphs help to compensate for his silence on that matter. Will readers/users accept (or even notice) the theme?

As any teacher and most compilers will realize, the multiple uses found for an anthology can scarcely be imagined by its creator, its publisher, or its reviewers. Bamforth's elegant assembly would make excellent bedtime reading for weary, thoughtful medics, and it is sure to find a hearty reception in Literature and Medicine courses. For its wide diversity, originality, sympathy for skepticism, and accessible structure, it could easily become the only item on a humanities course reading list. But then there is always that wonderful little piece in the corner that the book did not get at—one more photocopied handout, perhaps?