Literature and Medicine: The First Decade.

Abstract

Literature and Medicine:The First Decade Anne Hudson Jones (bio) The first volume of Literature and Medicine, which appeared forty years ago in 1982, offers many answers to the important question, Why? Why did the unusual conjunction of these two disciplines merit starting a journal? Equally important at the time was the question, How? How does one start a journal, especially without the support of an institution or professional society or financial guarantor? The answers to these basic questions help explain some of the constraints and opportunities that shaped the journal in its first decade. They also offer an opportunity to recognize and thank those without whose help the journal might not have begun or been able to develop and flourish as it has during the past four decades. Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, a feminist scholar and professor of English literature, religion, and humanities at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical Center, was the initiator. In 1978, she had organized a special session on literature and medicine for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA), which attracted a surprisingly large audience. Joanne Trautmann, who had been teaching literature and medicine at Pennsylvania State University Medical Center in Hershey since 1972, was on the panel, along with Harold Gene Moss from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and James C. Cowan from the University of Arkansas.1 Having recently accepted a new position in literature and medicine at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, I was an enthusiastic member of the audience, thrilled to see so much interest at the MLA in this new field. In answer to a question that evening about why she chose to work in medical education, Trautmann replied, "We are missionaries." Her comment surprised me at first, but I came to understand it as I learned more about the Society for Health and Human Values (SHHV) and the Institute on Human Values in Medicine (IHVM). Both had been [End Page 205] established "to explore creative methods to reintegrate the humanities into medical education."2 The goal was to help restore the important human relationships between caregivers and patients that had eroded even as scientific and technical advances provided ever more efficacious responses to bodily ills and malfunctions. Physicians, chaplains, and theologians at the forefront of the SHHV and the IHVM understood the important role literature could play in the education of health professionals by letting them hear fictional and autobiographical accounts of patients' experiences of illness and suffering, as well as the personal stories of fellow health professionals striving to care for patients, often against the odds. In the months that followed the MLA session, Rabuzzi, Trautmann, and I discussed the possibility of starting a journal. We enlarged our group, inviting D. Heyward Brock, Peter W. Graham, and William F. Claire to join our conversations and the cause. Brock, a professor of English literature and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Delaware, was working at the intersection of literature, science, and medicine. Graham had recently taken a position in the English Department at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. Claire, then a lobbyist for the State University of New York System, was the only one of us who had experience as a founding editor of a literary journal. We agreed that each of us would try to secure a contract with a press to publish the journal and that whoever succeeded in doing so would become its first editor. The rest of us would serve as associate editors, and each of us would take responsibility for a thematic volume to take the journal through its first six years, at which point we would reassess. Rabuzzi and Claire were soon able to secure an agreement with the State University of New York (SUNY) Press at Albany to begin publishing the journal, with Rabuzzi as the first editor. The first volume built on the conversation that had begun at the 1978 MLA special session, taking as its theme Toward a New Discipline. In retrospect, that theme seems wrong to me because the volume's essays, long and short, point...