Reviewed by: The Body in the Library: A Literary Anthology of Modern Medicine William Kerwin (bio) The Body in the Library: A Literary Anthology of Modern Medicine. Edited by Iain Bamforth. London and New York: Verso, 2003. Pp. xxx+418. $30. The field of literature and medicine is now well-established, diverse, and perhaps even crowded, within both the general literary culture and the academy. Iain Bamforth's idiosyncratic new anthology stands out because it combines some of the classics of literary medicine with lesser-known writings, and the result is an odd but appealing mix of the survey and the call to battle. Bamforth leads us through writing about medicine from the beginnings of the Enlightenment to the present moment, all the while emphasizing how "medical daring" (p. ix) has always depended on reading, first in the library and now in the body itself. His emphasis on medicine as a narrative art is a good way to understand the medical humanities. Either despite or because of the seemingly endless growth of "evidence-based medicine," the expensive and high-tech practice that drives our medical culture, recent decades have seen a simultaneous growth of an alternative approach to the experience of health and illness, one rooted in narrative—not just narratives about medicine, but the presence of narrative within medical practice and the lives of patients. Magazines and bookstores are full [End Page 690] of what some call "pathographies," personal accounts of illness experience or caregiving. Within the university system, the field of cultural studies has produced "body studies," the effort to narrate the intersections of the bodily and the historical, a movement that is a logical extension of the shift toward social history sparked by the Annales school and Foucault. The theoretical uses of narrative vary quite a bit among anthologies comparable to Bamforth's. Since 1999, thanks to a gift from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, an anthology entitled On Doctoring (1991) has been given to every beginning medical student in the United States. The letter accompanying the book explains the gift's purpose—"To help remind you of the splendor of your new profession"—and almost all of the selections come from literary figures. In contrast, The Social Medicine Reader (1997) combines literary pieces with ethnographic, historical, sociological, epidemiological, and scientific studies, all of which employ a narrative structure. Many other anthologies focus on a particular illness or location, and New York University administers a Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database on the web that provides extensive examples of narratives appropriate for teaching. It seems that everywhere you turn, either patients or physicians are telling their tales. The contribution of The Body in the Library lies less in its overall argument than its scattered insights, some from the editor and some from the anthologized authors. This is a book edited by a physician and a writer, not a physician and an academic, which helps explain its tone and style. The introduction is erudite and particular, given to comparative history and grand narrative: "Yet western medicine is ignorant of its past" (p. x), "Thatcherism, born of the unrest of the 1970s, was Britain's French Revolution" (p. xxiii). Such boldness and breeziness are startling. As the selections move from the late eighteenth century toward the present, Bamforth argues that a secular age emerges and, among physicians, a secular priesthood. Bamforth begins by quoting Kant, Sapere aude (dare to know for yourself), and, while he locates the origins of his "history of this medical daring" specifically in the publication in 1543 of Andreas Vesalius's anatomy, he quickly and permanently moves into the Enlightenment, defined medically by a rigorous dualism, separating souls from bodies and making the latter "vehicles of [humans'] being in the world" (p. ix). One argument lurking in the introduction is that we have fallen away from our heroic Enlightenment forebears. Bamforth condemns, or at least smirks at, a few possible culprits, especially consumerism and therapeutic culture. An interesting argument, also of a rather lurking sort, is found in Bamforth's tracing of the title nouns: the relation of "body" and "library" across this period. He emphasizes that the body has become a kind of library, and...
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Apr 1, 2010
William L Young 
Open Access
