Syllabi: Healing Words: The Literature of Medicine and the Medicine of Literature

INSTITUTION: University of Texas at Austin

INSTRUCTOR: Brian A. Bremen (email: bremen@uts.cc.utexas.edu)

ENROLLMENT: junior/senior undergraduate honors seminar; elective

SEMESTER: Spring 2008

COURSE DESCRIPTION

The relationships between medicine and literature are many and varied and as old as the Greeks. Above the door of the Library at Thebes were inscribed the words "Medicine for the Soul," and the methodology of Greek empiricism and Epicurean rhetoric was first formulated in the Hippocratic writings. Milton once discussed tragedy as a kind of homeopathic physic intended to "purge the mind," and George Puttenham thought his "poetic lamentations" acted therapeutically by "making the very grief itself cure of the disease." John Keats, Anton Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and William Carlos Williams all had medical training, and countless other physicians, such as Richard Seltzer and Oliver Sacks, have written about their practices in ways more literary than scientific.

This course will examine works by, about, and for doctors. In it we will explore how the "medical arts" developed historically into what we now consider the "science of medicine." Along the way we will look at how medical issues inevitably involve historically specific cultural biases and, at times, disguise these biases in the supposedly neutral terms of an empirical discourse. We will also examine how some doctors have sought to expand the boundaries of their practice by exploring the literary arts. Student projects will include an examination of contemporary issues such as alternative medical practices, the relationship between the mind and healing, and the AIDS crisis.

This course is a substantial writing component

READINGS

Daniel Defoe. The Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin Classics; 0-14-043015-6)

Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English. Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (The Feminist Press; 0-912670-20-7)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Yellow Wallpaper

G. E. R. Lloyd, ed. Hippocratic Writings (Penguin Classics; 0-14-044451-3)

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein (U of Chicago Press; 0-226-75227-5)

Samuel Shem. The House of God (Dell; 0-440-13368-8)

Susan Sontag. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (Anchor Books; 0-385-26705-3)

William Carlos Williams. The Doctor Stories (New Directions; 0-8112-0926-1)

Virginia Woolf. On Being Ill

REQUIREMENTS

Students will keep a dialectical reading journal, write a series of short papers (2 pages), and give a brief presentation (15 min.) based on a longer, research paper (12-15 pages). Short papers may be revised and resubmitted before the next paper is due. Grades will be based on class participation (10%), as well as on the above requirements (journal and short papers--60%; presentation--10%; final paper--20%).

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1

T Introduction
TH from A Casebook of Medical Ethics, Ackerman

Week 2

T from A Casebook of Medical Ethics, Ackerman
TH Sontag, , Against Interpretation

Week 3

T Sontag, , Against Interpretation
Darnton, Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge
TH Kuhn, fr. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Week 4

T/TH Foucault, The Discourse on Language

Week 5

T/TH Hippocratic Writings, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd (pp.67-86; 139-147; 237-51; 260-71)

First Paper (2 pages) due in class on Tuesday

Week 6

T/TH The Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe (cont.)
LA Weekly, If It Happened Here

Week 7

T The Autobiography of a Quack, S. Weir Mitchell
TH Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

Re-Write of First Paper (2 pages) due in class on Tuesday

Week 8

T AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag
Th Donna Haraway, The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies

Week 9

T The Sexual Politics of Sickness, Ehrenreich and English
TH from Doctor and Patient, S. Weir Mitchell

Conferences--preliminary bibliography/topic/thesis of research paper

Week 10

T The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"On Being Ill," Virginia Woolf
Th Case Stories: A Series
Strong Objectivity, Sandra Harding

Paper (2 pages) due in class on Tuesday

Week 11

Research Week

Week 12

T From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death, Keller
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
TH Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Argument and Bibliography of Research Paper Due Thursday

Week 13

T Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
TH The Doctor Stories, William Carlos Williams

Week 14

T The Doctor Stories, William Carlos Williams (cont.)
TH The House of God, Samuel Shem

Week 15

TT/TH The House of God, Samuel Shem
Research Paper (12-15 pages) and presentation due during exam time