Editor's Column

-S^.Ed¡tors' Column riS To most upper- and middle-income Americans, medicine connotes highly trained physicians, surgeons, and nurses; health care centers with aseptic operating rooms and an extensive and costly pharmacopoeia; cures; scientific advances; viruses and bacteria. But to people in other milieux medicine may have other connotations: sin, hex, poison, aberration, punishment, pollution, even political deviance. Literature also comes in familiar modes—the novel, short story, poem, and play. But literature has other forms of expression as well—song, prayer, incantation, liturgy, spell, and letter. Given differences among and within societies regarding the concepts, procedures, rituals, and symbols of medicine and the varied genres of literature, it is not surprising that medicine and literature are associated in many ways and that the results serve diverse purposes. The arrangement of the contributions to this issue of Literature and Medicine highlights these diverse uses and purposes of literature associated with medicine in societies other than our own. The first two selections concern literature depicting the struggles occasioned by the collision of different medical cultures in the same society —collisions that exemplify and symbolize the general cultural problems of that society. In Alfred Wang's discussion, the collision occurs when the culture of traditional Chinese medicine, based on such concepts as yin and yang, and the Five Elements (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth), meets the culture of modern Western medicine. Wang argues that the ensuing struggle in the medical arena symbolizes China's desire to become a modern nation—and the repudiation of that desire. Chinese must choose between an orthopedic surgeon and an acupuncturist, for example. The issue, as texts chosen from Lu Hsun and Maxine Hong Kingston illustrate, is not simply, as we in the West might put it, "How soon will the Chinese discover the superiority of Western medicine?" For the Chinese the stakes are both different and higher. In choosing between an acupuncturist and an orthopedic surgeon, the Chinese patient is not deciding between one highly recommended specialist and another, nor is he or she attempting simply to translate the words of one medical language into another. This is a choice that pits one belief system, one set of symbols, one whole cultural tradition against another. Even such basic notions as the body are constituted in radically different ways in these two traditions. EDITORS' COLUMN In Barbara Pope's essay we are reminded of a series of collisions, recurrent in the West since the early modern period—collisions between a culture of healing grounded in religious belief that allows for miracles and the ministry of charismatic healers, and the dictums and practices of modern, secular, scientific medicine. Pope shows us why Emile Zola's novel Lourdes continues to be a valuable guide to the medical, intellectual, political, and religious controversies about this famous shrine and the "cures" accorded to hopeful pilgrims and their devoted escorts. In the next five selections, literature—the word—rightly used, often in conjunction with liturgies and rites, is considered as a means of healing. Thus, James Preston explores the "fictive dimension of healing," especially as employed by Catholic devotees to cure serious illnesses. The texts are historical documents about the lives of saints, popular hagiographies, and testimonial cures. In this essay Preston is particularly interested in the use of the healing texts associated with the American Indian candidate for sainthood, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. He argues that the mythopoeic imagination, ascendant in earlier medical systems, continues to thrive as a source of healing for people living in overdeveloped technological societies . Similarly, the social context for Robert Orsi's essay is that of Catholic devotion to the saints, but he shows how the healing power of the word takes place largely through the act of writing. His particular focus is the cult of Blessed Margaret of Castello to whom the afflicted write letters, petitioning her to intercede on their behalf. In Orsi's view, by this act of writing, the petitioner engages in the act of restructuring the world so that the terrifying time and place of sickness, in which patients, relatives, and friends all feel powerless, are both miraculously transformed. His essay shows how belief in the word can assume dimensions...