Medical Fiction Research Articles

Consumptive Killers: Tuberculosis and Crime Fiction From L. T. Meade to Doc Holliday

Abstract This article examines the figure of the criminal consumptive in British and American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there is a substantial body of criticism dealing with the connections between criminal and pathological discourses in the fin-de-siècle and the first decades of the twentieth century, this piece argues for a more direct imaginative connection between tuberculosis and criminality in medical literature and fiction of this time. Beginning in the mid-century, but intensifying after Robert Koch’s identification of the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882, consumption was often tied to particular forms of emotional incoherence and ‘insanity’: the tubercular individual was supposedly inclined to frantic action, unaccountable ‘sensitivities’, and a potentially violent selfishness. In this rendering, the consumptive was thought to be inherently predisposed to become a killer. This article takes L. T. Meade’s story ‘The Horror of Studley Grange’ (1894) as a key literary case study for this discourse, but it also turns in its final section to consider the surprising ways in which early fictional representations of the consumptive Wild West gunslinger Doc Holliday depart from it. This article argues that writers such as Alfred Henry Lewis and Walter Noble Burns convert the tropes of consumptive dangerousness into signs of martial valour, reworking the narrative structures of pathological criminality into forms more suited to their frontier setting. In the presence of Holliday, works like Lewis’s The Sunset Trail (1905) and Burns’s Tombstone (1927) come to suggest that there is something tubercular about the character of the American West itself.

Ethical Dilemma and Technology Misuse in Medical Fiction of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The rapid advancement of medical technology has introduced new ethical quandaries that are increasingly explored within medical fiction. To explore these ethical misconducts and implications of technology misuse, the study selects the medical novel Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This study uses the Neutralization Theory of Sykes and Matza to examine the moral arguments and ethical conundrums raised in Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In that, the novel investigates how authors use the medium of fiction to not only highlight the profound ethical questions surrounding the development and application of new technologies but also to expose the fragility of the systems and individuals tasked with wielding such power. This selected medical narrative serves as cautionary tales that force readers to confront the moral and philosophical implications of technological progress in the medical field, calling doctors to consider the delicate balance between scientific advancement and preserving human dignity, autonomy, and the sanctity of life.

Reproductive Justice, Race, and the Prescience of the Past

The question of control—over bodies, knowledge, narrative, and nation—interweaves throughout Dana Medoro’s Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion and Stephanie Peebles Tavera’s (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship. Medoro focuses on discourses of life and women’s (non)reproductive sexuality in Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction. She establishes that the two authors were deeply skeptical of medicolegal definitions of life that created racial and economic hierarchies; through focal characters and indirect, playful prose, they critique discourses of life that valued some lives over others in the creation of Anglo-American nationalism. Tavera investigates late-nineteenth-century woman-authored medical fiction as directly engaging many of the same concepts Medoro explores. (P)rescription Narratives calls attention to the ways that Comstock-era censorship colluded with race science, medicine, and the law to limit women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy. It demonstrates literature’s agential capacities as the writers it addresses explicitly refute and redirect objectifying narratives. Combined, these texts show that questions of what “counts” as life, and by what (and whose) paradigms those lives can be lived, are hardly theoretical musings. Rather, they determine, systemically and corporeally, “life’s legibility and reproduction … in the name of American citizenship” (Medoro 19). These texts, in other words, are highly relevant and important as literary and cultural scholarship, making a powerful argument for the study of the humanities. But they are also important because they document the subversive and agential power of the written word to discern, document, and possibly heal—to affect change for today and the future.

(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship by Stephanie Peebles Tavera (review)

(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship by Stephanie Peebles Tavera (review)

(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship

(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship

(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship by Stephanie Peebles Tavera (review)

(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship by Stephanie Peebles Tavera (review)

Stephanie Peebles Tavera, (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship

Stephanie Peebles Tavera, <i>(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship</i>

Despiritualizing Death: A Comparative Study of Perspectives on Death in Medical Fiction

Many cultures venerate the process of dying and view it as a moment of passing into another world beyond what the living can experience with their senses. This perception especially in Abrahamic religions and cultures shaped by these religions is the source of the spiritualization of death. The process of dying becomes a journey of the spirit leaving the body, and it is a journey that needs to be honored. The adoption of Western medicine in the Arab world, however, has shifted these perceptions from venerated spiritualization to being viewed as a strictly biological process of the end of life. This cultural shift is represented in some short stories by the Egyptian writer Yūsuf Idrīs . His narrative might have been an allusion to a secular cultural shift that is experienced by medical staff in the 1960s and 1970s, who found themselves in a liminality of cultures. Yūsuf Idrīs's short stories are analyzed in comparison with The House of God (1978) by the American author Samuel Shem (b. 1944). This comparative study of the two authors' texts will examine the representation of cultural tensions in the medical field caused by the shift toward secularism, as these writers focus on how the spirituality of death can be shifted to the body and even sensualized. However, as Seamus O'Mahony suggests in The Way We Die Now (2016), in the medical field, dealing with death has become an attempt to control nature. These two representations may also be related to the illusion of control over death in the medical field.

Stephanie Peebles Tavera, (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship

Stephanie Peebles Tavera, (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship

Not just escapism—Medicine-related fiction films as therapeutical and education tools amid pandemic

Background: During epidemic disease outbreaks, people’s daily lives are restricted by quarantine and social distancing measures that can affect not only their physical and mental health but also other aspects of their lives, including education. The quality of medical education has suffered amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with on-site classes and conferences canceled or postponed. To address the resultant gaps in learning and supplement the rigors of formal medical teaching, recent research has suggested the use of nonfictional films. However, research on the educational and therapeutic value of fictional films is currently lacking. Methods: This study explored fiction films featuring medical practices, diseases, and treatments. The researcher conducted multiple searches using the largest internet movie databases (Internet Movie Database (IMDb), the American Film Institute Catalog, and the British Film Institute’s Collections Search) and literature research focusing on studies related to the value of films as visual learning and educational tools and their therapeutic effects on viewers in times of pandemics. Results: The researcher chose a representative selection of 20 films from over 100 years of cinematic history to educate and intellectually challenge practitioners under lockdown and use as a therapeutic tool. This study identified many ways films could be a potent instrument for medical education and a wide range of educational and therapeutic possibilities for use during public health crises. Medical fiction offers a highly entertaining and effective way to expand and improve medical knowledge and practices while respecting pandemic restrictions. The findings expand our knowledge on the value of medical fiction as an educational and therapeutic tool. Conclusions: Fictional films can be an advantageous, effective, and entertaining medium for educating physicians and improving their medical skills and practices. When public health crises or other concerns necessitate «work from home» and socially distanced conditions, movies can augment and enhance high-level medical learning and offer new perspectives that might be obscured in times of trauma, making them especially valuable for those struggling with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disease, detection and diagnosis: The medical short story and the struggle for literary success in the 1890s

After the first death of Sherlock Holmes in 1893, both Arthur Conan Doyle and L. T. Meade turned to the medical short story in order to fill the gap in the popular market. While Meade’s series in The Strand (1893–96), in collaboration with Dr Clifford Halifax, were extremely popular and created a new, sub-genre of detective fiction, Doyle’s stories, published in Round the Red Lamp (1894) were not well-received. The irony in this comes from the fact that Meade managed to adapt the Sherlock Holmes formula to medical fiction, while Doyle did not learn from his own success.

Sacrificing Mercy

Should you set aside religious convictions to allow a medically necessary procedure to save your life? Is it wrong to interfere with those who make the choice to die for their religious convictions? In this medical and faith-based philosophical short story fiction, Jenny is a devote Christian whose life is threatened by a terminal illness. However, she can be saved by the use of stem cell technology, which she considers cloning. As such, she declines the procedure and, against the urging of her husband, accepts her pending death. Her husband secretly dismisses her wishes and lies to the doctor so that, when she is near death, she is able to accept the life-saving stem cell procedure. Jenny lives, and divorces her husband for refusing to follow her religious wishes. Her husband regrets nothing.

Arthur Conan Doyle and Medical London: Reading the Topography ofRound the Red Lamp

This essay explores the short period of time that Arthur Conan Doyle spent between March and June 1891 when he moved his family into rooms in Bloomsbury and took a consulting room near Harley Street in an attempt to set up as an eye specialist. This last attempt to move up the professional hierarchy from general practitioner to specialist tends to be seen as a final impulsive move before Conan Doyle decided to become a full-time writer in June 1891. The essay aims to elaborate a little on the medical contexts for Conan Doyle’s brief spell in London, and particularly to track the medical topography in which he placed himself, situated between the radical, reformist Bloomsbury medical institutions and the fame and riches of the society doctors of Harley Street. These ambivalences are tracked in the medical fiction he published in Round the Red Lamp, his peculiar collection of medical tales and doctoring in 1894.

The Medical Woman as Amateur Detective in Anna Kingsford’s ‘A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor.’

Anna Kingsford’s “A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor” (1877) depicts a medical woman who becomes entangled in a murder plot whilst on vacation. Assuming the mantle of amateur detective, Dr Mary Thornton intervenes to prevent Dr George Pomeroy poisoning his sister-in-law, a wealthy widow. This little-known short story appeared at a critical time in the medical-woman movement in Britain. In contemporary medical writing and popular culture, the woman doctor was often represented as unfeminine and even as morbid or morally degenerate. Conversely, Kingsford portrays a healthy woman doctor who upholds professional ethics and criminal justice, while the story’s medical man is an unscrupulous villain. By exposing and denouncing Dr Pomeroy, Dr Thornton restores medicine’s reputation. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across literary studies and the history of medicine, this article positions Kingsford’s story at the advent and nexus of three emerging sub-genres: female detective fiction, the medical mystery, and medical woman fiction. I argue that, through the depiction of its heroine, “A Cast for a Fortune” constructs the amateur female sleuth and early woman doctor not as an outsider, but as the guardian of medico-morality.

A tale of two cities: The influence of literature on medicine

The following piece is a reflection concerning the interplay between the art of writing and the art of medicine. We are exploring the similarities and disparities of the field with a focus on doctors – medical students and fiction authors/poets. We are currently medical students and we identify as poets and fiction authors since our high school years and hence we are trying to point out our perspective. In the end we give some hints about the role that literature can play in modern medicine. Key words: medicine, literature, medical humanities, fiction, poetry

Popular Medical Fiction and the Holmesian Doctor Detective in L. T. Meade's Stories from the Diary of a Doctor

Popular Medical Fiction and the Holmesian Doctor Detective in L. T. Meade's <i>Stories from the Diary of a Doctor</i>

Her Body, Herland: Reproductive Health and Dis/topian Satire in Charlotte Perkins Gilman

ABSTRACT This article discusses Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) as a work of medical fiction and partial sex education manual that engages in conversation with various Progressive-era reproductive health discourses, especially scientific sex education theory and the birth control movement. Sex education at the fin de siècle often drew upon biological texts rather than anatomical or medical texts as a way to teach reproductive health during a period of censorship under Comstock Law. Gilman's use of satire rescripts this popular comparative biology approach to sex education by using entomology rather than plant or animal biology. Through satirical inversion, parthenogenesis functions as a defense for female body autonomy—or “voluntary motherhood”—and access to birth control. Although Gilman was sincere in her feminist argument for basic reproductive rights, a feminist disability studies reading of satire in Herland reveals a eugenics approach that eliminates impaired or disabled bodies from utopia.

LIBRARY OF THE KRONSTADT NAVAL HOSPITAL

In the middle of the XIX century in the Kronstadt naval hospital established medical library. Area of premises 248 m2. It consists of a subscription, a reading room and medical, artistic and historical literature. The library’s collection of books is 23 288, including 10189 of the medical literature, fiction and historical literature 13 099

Medical Fiction

Medical Fiction

Medical Fiction

Medical Fiction