Editor's Column

Abstract

-^Editor's Column The remarkable growth of interest in literature and medicine during the past decade makes the tenth anniversary of this journal a very special occasion. When the six founding editors—Joanne Trautmann Banks, D. Hey ward Brock, William Claire, Peter W. Graham, Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, and I—first met to discuss the possibility of such a journal, we foresaw neither the particular difficulties nor the general success of the venture. In geological time, ten years may be insignificant, but the ten-year survival of a new scholarly journal in an emerging field deserves notice. Our tenth anniversary offered an opportunity to take stock: to sum up the first decade of work in this new field and to look toward the future. I invited ten practitioners of literature and medicine to contribute to that end, each by responding to the theme of one previous volume, surveying work in the area since that volume was published, and offering an agenda for future research. Unlike any of our previous volumes, this one is entirely commissioned, for it was unlikely that anyone would be working on just the kind of essay that I wanted here. The challenge was to match contributor with theme. Each essayist had the freedom to interpret the assignment as he or she thought best. Some volumes called for one kind of response, some another. The result is a collection of remarkably varied and fascinating essays that help move the field forward conceptually and prepare for the work of the next decade. Kathryn Montgomery Hunter opens volume 10 by responding to our first volume, which took as its theme Toward a New Discipline. Hunter assesses the state of the field in 1982 and its strengths and shortcomings in the decade since. She believes that literature and medicine differs most from mainstream literary studies in its disregard for theory, and she calls for a reassessment of the value of literary theory to our enterprise as we move toward the cultural interpretation of medicine. Volumes 2, 3, and 4 of Literature and Medicine took as their themes traditional approaches to the conjunction of the two disciplines. Yet in her essay responding to volume 2, Images of Healers, Carol Donley observes that nontraditional seeds were already sprouting there. As she points out, volume 2 focuses less on images of the traditional white male physician than on images of nurses, minority healers, patients themselves, and even the narrative process, all as healers. Donley provides an overview of Literature and Medicine 10 (1991) ix-xii © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press EDITOR'S COLUMN significant publications about images of healers that have appeared since volume 2 was published, and she calls for more studies of the changing images of healers as we approach the next century. Richard Selzer responds to our third volume, The Physician as Writer, with an expostulation, chiding our scholars and critics for treating physician-writers too kindly. Physician-writers must be held to the same rigorous standards we apply to other writers, he insists. Anything less demeans the writer and the field. His admonition is the more meaningful because he is one of our preeminent physician-writers. Samuel Shem—a practicing psychiatrist, novelist, and playwright— responds to volume 4, Psychiatry and Literature, by describing a paradigm shift, from focus on the self to a relational perspective, in both psychiatry and literature. He makes a compelling case for connection as the vital link between psychiatry and literature, the link that should be celebrated and explored. In our fifth volume, Lise and Abuse of Literary Concepts in Medicine, we began to move away from traditional approaches and considered a variety of literary concepts as they had been used in medicine. Suzanne Poirier responds to this effort by calling for clearer definition of terms, as we turn more explicitly now to narrative as the strongest bond between literature and medicine. She combines her response to the issues in volume 5 with a discussion of three related books published in the past decade: Eric J. Cassell's Talking with Patients, Howard Brody's Stories of Sickness, and Arthur Kleinman's The Illness Narratives. In volume 6 we offered our first nonthematic volume, a...