Both the actualities and the metaphorical possibilities of illness and medicine abound in literature: from the presence of tuberculosis in Franz Kafka's fiction or childbed fever in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to disease in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or in Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska; from the stories of Anton Chekhov and of William Carlos Williams, both doctors, to the poetry of nurses derived from their contrasting experiences. These are just a few examples of the cross-pollination between literature and medicine.
It is no surprise, then, that courses in literature and medicine flourish in undergraduate curricula, medical schools, and continuing-education programs throughout the United States and Canada.
This volume, in the MLA series Options for Teaching, presents a variety of approaches to the subject. It is intended both for literary scholars and for physicians who teach literature and medicine or who are interested in enriching their courses in either discipline by introducing interdisciplinary dimensions.
The thirty-four essays in Teaching Literature and Medicine describe model courses; deal with specific texts, authors, and genres; list readings widely taught in literature and medicine courses; discuss the value of texts in both medical education and the practice of medicine; and provide bibliographic resources, including works in the history of medicine from classical antiquity.
About the Author: Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, PhD, is associate professor of humanities at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. She is author ofArchetypes of Conversion (Assoc. UP, 1985) and Reconstructing Illness: A Study in Pathology (Purdue UP, 1993; 2nded. 1999) as well as coeditor of an issue of Literature and Medicine on the medical case history (1992), an issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy on literature and medical ethics (1996), and Time to Go: Three Plays on Death and Dying, with Commentary on End-of-Life Issues (U of Pennsylvania P, 1995). She is currently working on a book about pediatric AIDS patients and their caregivers in a tertiary-care medical center.
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, PhD, is chair of the English department at Westmont College, where she teaches a range of courses in poetry and fiction as well as literature and medicine to undergraduates. She serves on the boards of Literature and Medicine; the online Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database; and the Center for Medicine, Humanities, and Law in Berkeley. She offers occasional workshops on topics in literature and medicine to physicians and other health-care workers as well as to various interest groups. Her writing includes articles on literature and medicine in Academic Medicine, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Literature and Medicine, Medical Humanities Review, and other professional journals. She also serves as associate editor of the Santa Barbara Review, a literary journal, and writes poetry and essays.
