Literature and Medicine Core Course

Teachers: Brian Hurwitz and Neil Vickers

Course outline
The primary question that this course seeks to address is ‘How can literature and medicine enrich each other?’ It is intended to get students to think about the methodological difficulties of interdisciplinarity as well as its potential advantages. Among the topics the course will consider are: The uses and abuses of medical concepts in the study of literature
- Literature and the representation of the body
- Illness and the nature of artistic experience
- Illness and the construction of character
- Literature and pain
- The patient as text
- Illness as metaphor
- Diagnosis and detection
- Are literary encounters a surrogate form of clinical experience?
- Is scientific writing literature?
- Theatre of medical disorders

Texts studied
Among the books we will be reading, some or all of the following may be included:

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility;

Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness (rev. 2003),

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks [Selections];

John Diamond, because cowards get cancer, too.

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet and The Speckled Band;

Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (rev. 1999); Cheryl Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (2003);

Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge (1991);

Ruth Picardie, Before I Say Goodbye (1998);

Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective (1986);

Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997);

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (rev. 1990);

John Updike, Self-consciousness (1989),

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (1940).