Special Feature: The Physician as Witness

Abstract

The Physician as Witness Suzanne Poirier (bio) The three articles that follow may at first glance seem to be unrelated. Stevan Weine writes about his experience working both with survivors of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and with a playwright and actors who depict one such survivor. Douglas Reifler reports on a course he has developed that asks medical students to write about their experiences in gross anatomy—at times even asking them to imagine their cadavers’ experiences. Finally, Marjorie Sirridge and Brenda Pfannenstiel bring us a selection of the rich reading they have found in the lives of early women physicians. All of these articles partake of the notion of witnessing, a familiar concept long associated with the courts and the pulpit but more recently coming to dramatic attention through the stories of survivors of illness, domestic violence, and genocide. Most studies of witnessing focus on trauma. To the extent that Sirridge and Pfannenstiel’s autobiographers were women breaking into a man’s profession, these women were survivors as well as pioneers. Their tales often contain humor but also contain the hurts of hazing, rejection, and isolation. Reifler’s students struggle to incorporate their often upsetting confrontations with their cadavers into their understanding of themselves as physicians and their cadavers as human beings—to sustain the humanity of them both. Stevan Weine finds that hearing the stories of survivors of the genocide in Bosnia is not enough. In searching a broader arena to publicize the outrage of these events he seeks as well to find a way to conceptualize the health professional who, in turn, bears witness. One of the reasons why witnessing may have captured the attention of scholars may be the multiple levels on which it operates. In its clearest form, the witness is one who recounts his or her experience. What, though, do we call the people who hear and respond to that witness? Weine’s decision to serve as dramaturg to a play about one survivor of mass rape in Bosnia is the most vivid example of such a response in these three papers, but Reifler’s decision to write about (and quote) his students’ stories and Sirridge and Pfannenstiel’s impulse to share the autobiographies that have inspired them also partake of [End Page 165] this next level of witnessing. Their articles report other people’s experiences, but they also reflect the authors’ own responses to those other people. Moreover, the impulses that sent Sirridge (who later engaged Pfannenstiel) to find women physicians’ autobiographies, Reifler to create Reflections on Gross Anatomy, and Weine to begin working with survivors of ethnic cleansing speak of other levels of personal witness that are only implicit in most of these articles. Witnessing thus spins out, creating more accounts and enmeshing more people’s responses. Such a process raises issues that are literary as well as social and political. Scholars who study trauma and witnessing are as diverse in their interests and their understandings as—probably even more than—are Weine, Reifler, and Sirridge and Pfannenstiel. To highlight some of the ways in which these three articles complement each other and challenge the reader, I have invited two noted scholars to respond to them. Kali Tal comes to trauma studies from literature. Her book Worlds of Hurt examines novels of wartime, and she takes the approach of a literary scholar who seeks to plumb and honor the trauma of the unique voices and experiences of survivors. Jonathan Shay is a physician who has also studied the stories of combat survivors, in his book Achilles in Vietnam, but he asks, through the concept of communalization, how we can best fight conditions that brutalize others in the name of the public good. Between them, they offer other lenses through which to think about the articles in this feature. This special feature, however, serves an additional purpose. As I have described in the Editor’s Column, this issue of Literature and Medicine marks the inauguration of the Literature and Medicine Home Page. A major feature of the home page is a section of Letters to the Editor. These three articles and their provocative responses invite considerations—of the physician as witness, of ways...