Editor's Column

The articles in this issue of Literature and Medicine engage history in a variety of ways. Some explore possibilities of literary-medical influence or the literary-medical lives of great personages, approaches that have long been of interest to readers of Literature and Medicine. Other articles follow approaches more recently developed by such interdisciplinary fields as women’s studies, African American studies, American studies, and cultural studies. All of these articles, however, pose similar, fundamental questions about the evolution of medicine and medical thought—and their effects on the people they serve. I have chosen to bring them together in this general issue because, while they address a wide range of topics, they give us a special opportunity to consider how history contributes—and has probably always contributed—to the more narrowly identified field of literature and medicine.

History is a silent partner of literature. It is a relationship that we in literature and medicine often overlook in our effort to establish a vital connection between the two disciplines—and professions—we seek to unite. In fact, one of the arguments we have offered most convincingly to medicine is the timelessness of literature in addressing the human condition. We argue, for example, that Sophocles’s Philoctetes has as much to teach us about the isolation and degradation of suffering today as it did in ancient Greece. Likewise, we recognize Ivan Ilych’s despair and search for meaning as he faces death alone, even though surrounded by his family and physicians. Many of us have found, however, that understanding early Greek notions of state and service brings a political dimension to Philoctetes’s desire to die that is quite different from debates about autonomy in the play Whose Life Is It, Anyway? “The Death of Ivan Ilych” takes on added depth, as does, more recently, Tillie Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle,” when students recognize the social-political critiques that underlie the characters’ search for a meaningful death (many editions of these two stories, in fact, provide footnotes that parse the historical allusions). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” can only be understood fully (or, perhaps the better word is fairly) within the broader picture of the social and medical views of women in the late-nineteenth-century United States.

In short, however timeless the emotions and questions literature represents, it is also grounded in the time and place of its writing. Underscoring past literature’s relevance to today’s issues in health and illness need not deny the value of its historicity. The historical context of a literary work and its author provides insight into the politics, cultural biases, and economic forces that shape character and event. Historical sensitivity to literature needn’t distract from the text; rather, it will often enhance as it renders a text more complex and, in turn, actually more relevant to the complex mix of politics, medicine, culture, and personality that underlies every present medical situation.

History, likewise, is a close cousin to literature. As literature is situated in time, history is grounded in narrative. In recent years historians have become increasingly aware that “the past” is no one thing; that events are the result of complex interplays of people, ideas, and circumstances; and that past and present are always in uneasy tension in time’s movement into future. Historians who bring a literary consciousness to their work will write histories that recognize contingency, diversity, and ambiguity.

Allen W. Grove’s article, “Röntgen’s Ghosts: Photography, X-Rays, and the Victorian Imagination,” offers an excellent example of literature registering both advances in scientific technology and a public curiosity that incorporates technology into popular discourse. Beginning with the advent of photography and ending with the discovery of the X-ray, Grove shows how the images created by these devices contributed to reshaping the familiar genre of the ghost story. This reshaping reflects the changes that the new technologies forced people to make in the way they viewed the unseen—both from beyond the sentient world and within the now-permeable boundaries of their own bodies. Examining literature such as Henry James’s The...