An Arrival, A Departure, A Narrative that Continues to Emerge

Abstract

An Arrival, A Departure, A Narrative that Continues to Emerge Charles M. Anderson This issue of Literature and Medicine marks the beginning of a new editorial era for the journal. And with the death of Joanne Trautmann Banks, a woman generally recognized as one of the most important pioneers in the field of literature and medicine and one of the original members of this journal’s editorial board, it marks an even more important ending. For me, this is a bittersweet time. On the one hand, I am delighted and honored to assume editorial leadership of this journal, which I began reading in 1985, as I prepared to write my University of Iowa dissertation on the early works of Richard Selzer. Looking back at my copy of volume one, I find it dog-eared, scribbled on, a sticky note protruding from the top, marking “Recent Works of Interest,” a review written by Peter W. Graham of several volumes. I have either cited or taught each of these books. After reading the first issues of the journal, I knew I had found my scholarly dwelling place, alive and full of smart people with whom I hoped someday to talk across the pages of our common work. Those conversations began almost immediately in the ideas, footnotes, and bibliographical entries that made their way into my dissertation. A few years later, I would get to meet many of those remarkable people; they would take me in and make me a part of their most collegial family, read my dissertation, and help it to become Richard Selzer and the Rhetoric of Surgery. Along the way, I began to teach a course called Medicine through Literature at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences where I learned about and joined an organization called the Society for Health and Human Values. The first time I attended that organization’s annual [End Page vi] convention, I met many of the people whose work I had read and admired and many others who were, so to speak, plowing the same field I was trying to plow. It was heaven to suddenly have colleagues from all over the country and the world, to know that I really had not taken leave of my senses as my dissertation director had thought when Richard Caplan, the practicing physician on my committee, and I insisted on keeping what my chair called “all that medical stuff” in my dissertation. It was at this conference that I met Jo and Sam Banks. It was a reception in a classic hotel ballroom, gaudy chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, splashing the walls with sparkling, rainbow lights. It was crowded, but when they walked in, the crowd parted like the Red Sea, and there they were, gliding through the room, her hand on his arm, her eyes out sparkling those chandeliers, her laughter flowing over the crowd like honey over one of my momma’s homemade biscuits. I don’t remember who introduced us, but for just a moment, Jo and Sam were right there, right then, right in front of me, smiling, pleased to meet me. And then they were gone, moving through the crowd like royalty, “beyond the reach of time,” as N. Scott Momaday might have put it.1 I wanted to go down on one knee. Over the years that followed, I learned of course that Jo and Sam were not royalty, that they were as mortal and touchable as the rest of us. Sam’s long, slow dying saddened Jo and all who knew them. Sometime after it was done, I sat across a table from her in a dimly lit restaurant in Santa Fe learning how a woman of her capacities handled loss and pain and grief: gracefully, with dignity, and with a faith that did not waver. I was never one of Jo’s closest colleagues or most intimate friends, but throughout my career, she was a presence, sometimes a scholarly influence, sometimes a voice at the far end of a telephone line, encouraging me as she encouraged so many others, in my case, to take the plunge, which I almost always did. If Jo said so, why would I...