The satiric image: healers in The House of God

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The satiric image: healers in The House of God Kathryn Montgomery Hunter Literature has often been unkind to doctors. Even Ecclesiasticus, which celebrates the power of medicine, describing doctors as the agents of God, cautions, "He that sinneth before his Maker, Let him fall into the hands of the physicians" (38:15). And doctors, like women and governments, those other forces which man has feared were inescapable, have frequently been the targets of satire. Sometimes—as in Molière's plays or their modern-day descendant, Jules Romains's Dr. Knock—the doctor crystalizes the stupidity and greed in the society around him. Dr. Y. and Dr. Z., the inept and greedy practitioners in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, are little worse than the grieffeigning widow, Brigit Bliful, whose husband they have failed to revive: So little then did our Doctors delight in Death, that they discharged the Corpse after a single Fee; but they were not so disgusted with their living Patient; concerning whose Case they immediately agreed, and fell to prescribing with great Diligence. (Book II, Chapter ix) Occasionally doctors have been more harshly satirized for their motives. Chaucer's Doctor of Phisik in the Canterbury Tales is a worldly, literate, well-dressed man, more prosperous than his fellow pilgrims. In league with the apothecaries and having studied "but litel on the Bible," Quotations are reprinted by permission of Richard Marek Publishers, Inc., a division of The Putnam Publishing Group, from THE HOUSE OF GOD by Samuel Shem. Copyright © 1978 by Samuel Shem, M.D. 236 THE SATIRIC IMAGE He kepte that he wan in pestilence. For gold in phisik is a cordial, Therefore he loved gold in special. ("Prologue," lines 444-46) Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels has his surgeon-hero describe to the rationalist Houyhnhnm the strange customs of his fellow practitioners: . . . there was a Sort of People bred up among us, in the Profession or Pretence of curing the Sick. . . . One great Excellency in this Tribe is their Skill at Prognosticks, wherein they seldom fail; their Predictions in real Diseases, when they rise to any Degree of Malignity, generally portending Death, which is always in their Power, when Recovery is not. . .. (Part IV, Chapter vi) A great range of medical malpractitioners, fame-struck, officious, greedy, ignorant, and duplicitous, appears in George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma. The poor best of them is saved from tuberculosis to slave on in London's slums only by the accident of a colleague's lust. Kind words like John Donne's for the uncertainties of his physical ministers in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and sympathetic doctor-characters like Lydgate, the fallible idealist of George Eliot's Middlemarch, are almost rare. Even Martin Arrowsmith's shining armor in Sinclair Lewis's celebration of the medical profession acquires much of its glow in contrast with the dullness or greed or egotism of the doctors around him. Samuel Shem's The House of God is different from all these. Although it is not a great book, for the moment—particularly for doctors and teachers of doctors—it is an important one. Regarded as something of a scandal in the medical profession, it was written pseudonymously from the "inside" by a former medical intern whose name, translated, is "Name." His hero, fresh from the Best Medical School, located in Boston, is apprenticed to the medical service in the House of God: Harvard's Beth Israel, with more than a glance at the infamous Hôtel Dieu in eighteenthcentury Paris. Heretofore, anti-doctor satire has been just that: an exaggerated fictional or metaphoric attack upon the lives and deeds of recognizable or typical doctors. Their power has come from our need of them, their traffic with life and death, and the money we are willing to pay them to stave off death or debility. But as technology has altered the practice of medicine, widening its province to include some version of every modem Kathryn Montgomery Hunter 137 moral problem, so has it changed the tenor of satire. The character of medicine nowadays is almost separable from the men and women who practice it, and nowhere is this more evident than in...

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