“Good Readers Make Good Doctors”: Community Readings and the Health of the Community

Abstract

One of my best experiences as a professor of literature—one of those moments that make the whole endeavor worthwhile—occurred during a discussion of Kafka's The Metamorphosis in the visitation room of a former funeral parlor. The building had been acquired by my local hospital and converted into a meeting space with rickety metal folding tables, and it was home to my first Literature & Medicine reading and discussion group.That night, I was experimenting with a risky pairing, linking Kafka's text with an article on doctors and sex-reassignment surgery for infants born with ambiguous genitalia (Feder 294–320). As health-care professionals, members of this reading community were excited by Kafka's adeptness at conveying the array of emotions experienced by Gregor Samsa and his family, including shame, rage, helplessness, and fear at the sudden change in a loved one. The economic dilemmas of the isolated family, together with their sudden questioning of the definition of the monstrous, gained new echoes and generated fresh readings.For me as a scholar, the insights evoked by this pairing generated the same excitement and sense of discovery I experience after successfully explaining a complicated bit of literary interpretation. In turn, the Literature & Medicine programs sponsored by many state humanities councils create valuable reading communities by bringing scholars into hospitals to discuss texts about medical issues with doctors, nurses, and other employees. They offer critically important opportunities for health-care workers to talk about issues that may not arise elsewhere. For example, discussions of sex-reassignment surgery remain taboo in many hospitals, precisely because for many staff and family members the very idea of intersexuality is monstrous. On a broader basis, the effect of Gregor's change on his family echoes the consequences of the sudden disability of a family member. The pairing I presented thus allowed hospital staff members new, more sympathetic insights as well as opportunities to talk about the topics outside the press of everyday practice.—Amy Levin