Reflections on Literature and Medicine, Their Interactions and Influence

Abstract

Reflections on Literature and Medicine, Their Interactions and Influence Shu-Fang Lai (bio) and Peih-Ying Lu (bio) The present double issue originated in the guest editors' joint attempt to associate literary studies with medics, medicine, and the health profession. In response to the global outbreaks of the recent pandemics that have caused deaths worldwide, along with public health and socioeconomic issues that have been challenging humankind in recent times as they have throughout recorded history, we initiated recruiting original and cross-boundary investigations into the dynamic interactions between literature and medicine in hopes of highlighting the multidisciplinary field of medical humanities. This special double issue aims to explore the topic of literature in the broader sense of expressing ideas and creative imagination in various forms (from poetry and fiction to spoken language and graphic novels) and its relation to medicine; to trace their reciprocal influences; to encompass inquiries into medical humanities with diversified scopes in not only literary studies, but also other disciplines such as history, ethics, medical discourse, applied linguistics, psychology, education, and art. Our principal objective is to gaze at the vast research horizon for medical humanities, and an array of six articles with this introductory account attend to the dialogue between literature and medicine; to probe the medical profession, the human conditions of diseases and illness, pains and suffering; and to grasp the nature of life and the meaning of living. Regarding literature and medicine, we set out to consider first the role of medical practitioners and their practice of healing as imagined in literature. Epistemologically speaking, in Western literature, the image of a person with the knowledge to assist the ill to overcome physical pains and disease emerged as early as in mythological legends and the Bible. For example, as seen in one of the earliest illustrated manuscripts, "The Great Cauldron in the Underworld," the witches in Irish tales had the power of healing the wounded and bringing the dead back to life; they were also endowed with the secret knowledge about other worlds.1 Christian writings from the 2nd-century BCE mention a band of rebel angels who descended to Earth: they "defile[d] themselves" with human women and "taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with [End Page v] plants" (Charles 192).2 These angels hence trained the first witches (or magic-makers) to learn the art of healing. In Arthurian legend, Morgana le Fay, King Arthur's half-sister apprenticed to the enchanter Merlin, is said to give healing ointments and to carry the fatally wounded Arthur off to the Isle of Apples (Avalon). Then Paracelsus (1493-1541), the Swiss-German Renaissance physician (also botanist, alchemist, astrologer, and general occultist), is referred to recurrently in fiction and poetry.3 Nevertheless, the sorceress could be harmful to Queen Guinevere, toward whom she showed enmity.4 In England, during the reign of Henry VIII, Parliament passed an act in 1542 "to protect herbalists from persecution by the Company of Physicians and Chirurgeons" (Leyel 96).5 More classic examples can be found to highlight the healer's special knowledge about nature and their unusual power, though sometimes tinged with negative qualities such as the ability to harm people. Nicholas Culpeper's The English Physician or Astrologo-physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs (1652) includes a list of magic healers and physicians who blur the distinction between astrological herbalism and medicine as in the modern conception. In the contexts of the above Western classics, the medical practitioner's knowledge, power, labor, and care for the patient are often at the core. Following the advances in medical science, many Romantic and Victorian writers began to press the moral issues about physicians and surgeons. The famous case of the trials of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh is typical of skepticism about the ethics of the medical profession. A surgeon might likely be subject to moral degradation, just as Robert Louis Stevenson's famous Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) shows. After the Parliament decreed in 1752 that all executed murderers could be dissected, the Anatomy Act of 1832 legalized the use of "unclaimed" bodies for dissection by the...