Dada doctors
WHETHER writing is doctoring by other means or whether the more usual reverse is the case, the connection between medicine and literature is as old as history itself. In modern times, when vocations and callings have become well-regulated professions, doctors have enthusiastically entered both the serious literary canon and the bestseller lists. Chekhov, Axel Munthe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham and A.J. Cronin happily gave up their earlier discipline for their later publishing celebrity. Their subject matter as authors was seldom specifically medical, though their temperaments continued to owe much to their training as observers and carers in hospitals and consulting rooms. In this absorbing anthology, Iain Bamforth is drawn particularly to those medicos who serve the wider literary allegiance while remaining devoted to their original practice — many of them continuing to work as doctors throughout their writing lives. So we encounter Geogges Duhamel, whose description of a French Field Surgery Unit seems like "M*A*S*H" without the humour; Miguel Torga, whose diary of a country GP's life in Portugal is a fascinating sociological study of the impact of medicine on a remote rural community; and, finest of all, William Carlos Williams, in an account of the death of a girl whose meningitis was improperly diagnosed by her doctors, which is so sensitive yet direct in its feeling that any opponent of Williams' poetry would be thrust back into an appreciation of his overall sensibility.
Bamforth is both poet and doctor, and his stance is sceptical of medicine in its wonder-working vein, but sympathetic to its philosophical and humanist leanings. Perhaps no one knows quite what Novalis meant when he stated that "Every sickness is a musical problem, and every cure a musical solution" (quoted in W.H.Auden's poem "The Art of Healing"), but many of the writers included in The Body in the Library would agree with him that some mystery, not necessarily artistic or religious, nor even Platonic, should be looked for when attempting to understand the hold on human emotion which the phenomenon of disease and illness has always had. The level of scepticism of the improvements brought about by modern medicine among Bamforth's contributors is high, notably when the deathbed is the theatre exposed to medicine's most sought-after conjuring tricks. One after another they line up to contest the practice of keeping the dying alive a little longer. Allied to such scenes are copious recordings of grim remedies and botched operations, together with the reiteration of the need for individual minds to a find a composure which will enable them to face their inevitable extinction.
It is difficult to be sure what Bamforth means by the qualifying adjective "modern" in the subtitle. The collection begins with a macabre anecdote by Dickens, proceeds through Lytton Strachey's Florence Nightingale at Scutari, exudes forensic charm with Léon Daudet's portrait of Charcot and leaves the 19th Century with Chekhov's description of traversing Siberia, which is not concerned with medicine. Why not dig further back? Crabbe's murderous doctor in The Village might have earned a place, and before him, in the pages of Burton, Molière, Lichtenberg, Shakespeare and ultimately of the founding fathers (Galen and Hippocrates), some glittering aphorisms might have been gathered.
Even within his declared catchment area, a few hard cases are missing — among them Shaw's "Doctor's Dilemma" Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and The Black Swan, Auden and Isherwood's The Dog beneath the Skin, Martin Bax's remarkable metaphor-novel The Hospital Ship, and the striking portrait of the destruction of Novalis' family by tuberculosis in Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Blue Flower. More poems would have been welcome. Weldon Kees, Peter Goldsworthy, Dannie Abse and Thom Gunn take part, but given that poetry has been a natural medium for reporting the extravagance of illness, the absence of Rimbaud, Lowell, James Wright and Peter Redgrove is surprising.
However, any disappointment aroused by a reviewer's inevitable desire to compile his own anthology fades beside gratitude to Bamforth for his extensive representation of writers from Europe and America. He does not rely on any comforting Anglo-Saxon reasonableness. Intellect at its most dazzling will be found in contributions by Kierkegaard, Hjalmar Söderberg, Gottfied Benn, Kafka (a frightening fantasy of a doctor's being called out unexpectedly), Ernst Weiss, Guido Ceronetti and Richard Huelsenbeck (the doctor as repatriated Dadaist). While Iain Bamforth's team is as questioning of psychosomatic theory as it is of orthodox medicine, it has a more friendly relationship with the notion of illness as metaphor. Extracts from Susan Sontag bring the book to a convincing thematic close.
If there is one piece which touches genius, it is Virginia Woolf's "Illness", a detailed analysis of how our idea of sickness has become the ground plan of our whole perception of how we live. This essay and the paradox of the judge's speech in Samuel Butler's Erewhon sum up the anthology's unorthodox attitude — "You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate". The crime, of course, is to be sick.
PETER PORTER
The Body in the Library: A Literary Anthology of Modern Medicine, edited by Iain Bamforth, Verso, p.418, Pounds 20.
1 85984 534 7
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