Can We Resurrect Apollo?

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-g* Can We Resurrect Apollo? Joanne Trautmann I. The Intricacies of the Dialogue As someone who has been teaching literature in a medical setting for nine years, I have been asked to write a state-of-the-union essay for this inaugural issue of our new journal: the state of the union, that is, between literature and medicine. I feel obliged to begin by stating that it is presently tenuous. In the first place, the language itself confounds us. "After all," a cautious colleague of mine once remarked, "and is a neutral word. You can link anything and anything else, but you do not necessarily have a valid new entity." Nonetheless, we must make do with "literature and medicine," for we do not have at our disposal an efficient prefix on an analogy with those useful bio-, psycho-, and socio- models. Then there is the problem of patina. In part, the link between literature and medicine has been devised by those from one side who wish to assume a veneer of acquaintance with the other. To some medical people literature is a refinement, a field one need not study in the same laborious way as medicine, but which one may pick up delicately, as one does an hors d'oeuvre. Similarly, some people from literature find that an interest in the solidly helpful field of medicine is a security against being cast by a philistine society onto the growing pile of useless English professors. Now it's not always true that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. To desire a little knowledge of another's field may be adventurous and imaginative. It may even be the mark of a continually self-educating mind. The effect of that knowledge may be increased intimacy with other human beings. But when the motivation is merely artistic or scientific patina, there is not the stuff of a brave new journal. There are more serious issues as well. To some extent, all interdisciplinary work begins in fragility. If two disciplines come together out of a need felt by members of only one of the fields, for instance, the convergence lacks organic connection. They may be thrown together, and some good may come of the serendipitous proximity for a time, but the relationship becomes less attractive after a few couplings. Even if an Literature and Medicine 1 (Rev. ed., 1992) 1-18 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press CAN WE RESURRECT APOLLO? entirely new perspective on matters eventually materializes, will the tools of one discipline be used to illuminate the concerns of the other? Will new methods be developed? A representative of one discipline may start a discussion, hoping that a spokesperson for the other will respond, and assuming that from somewhere will appear a Great Synthesizer. But there are few Jacob Bronowskis, René Duboses, or Elizabeth Sewells. Once upon a time there was no question of interdisciplinary tenuity . Isn't it pretty to think so? Health-giving Apollo embodied both poetry and medicine within himself. During the Renaissance the Galenic theory of medicine so thoroughly saturated ontology and epistemology that Elizabethan dramatists used medical images that scarcely needed to rise to the metaphorical level. What a man was the Renaissance Man! And there were others, the worthy doctor-writers, whose world views were not split and through whom literature-and-medicine as an entity comes down to us—Rabelais, Smollett, Chekhov, Williams. But this short narrative has several elements of the fairy tale in it. Anton Chekhov in his time was troubled. He might rail against those who think that anatomy and belles lettres are antagonistic approaches to the study of humankind. But he was also fond of telling friends that medicine was his lawful wife and literature his mistress. A gentle man, Chekhov kept the two from meeting in polite society. He also said that he was rather like the dog in the Russian proverb who chased two hares and therefore caught neither. William Carlos Williams practiced poetry and medicine out of the same house in Rutherford, New Jersey, and his theories about objectivity seem to have unified him. He was a firstrate poet. I have heard that he was a mediocre...

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