Summary:

This novel is narrated by Katie Carr, who very much wants to be a good person.  She is a physician and a mother of two, and lives with her petulant husband, David.  David is the author of a column in the local newspaper called "Angriest Man in Holloway".  As their marriage falls apart, David undergoes a conversion at the hands of GoodNews, a young guru, and ceases to be sarcastic and angry, embarking instead on an effort to improve the world with acts of kindness.  Katie is forced to consider what it means to be a good person and how that affects whether to salvage her marriage, how to raise her children and how to be the type of physician she always considered herself to be.

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Although the setting is startlingly different, and the care provided is through highly unorthodox means, the healer in this science fiction story experiences in remarkably similar ways the everyday wear and tear of modern medical practice. Snake, a young female itinerant healer, has been asked to save the life of a young boy. Her attempts to do so, and her interactions with the boy, his family and community, and the tools of her trade (the snakes-mist, sand and grass) are detailed in the story. "Professional development" issues that this strong and complex character has to deal with include truth-telling, interfering and ignorant family members, self-sacrifice, and possible reprobation by her peers and teachers.

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Amelia Stern is an academic pediatrician in a large city hospital and mother of a bright, young son. She is deeply involved with her patients, including Darren, born with AIDS, and Sara, the malnourished child of anxious parents, both lawyers. As she struggles to answer to the demands of her work for "other women’s children," she neglects her own child and her marriage begins to fall apart. Her husband’s resentment and her own feelings of guilt come to a crisis when her son falls seriously ill while she is at the hospital.

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Schiebinger’s historical analysis looks at the role of women and female nature in modern science in four places. These are: institutional organizations (when and how did medical schools and fraternities allow or disallow female participation?), individual biographies (who were trendsetters in the history of science?), scientific determinations of female nature (how did scientists decide what makes woman woman?), and cultural meanings of gender.

Chapter Seven is an especially disruptive chapter, analyzing drawings of female skeletons at the turn into the nineteenth century. Earlier, female skeletons had been drawn in the same way as male skeletons. At this point, however, they became thin-boned and wide-hipped. Sexual difference became far more central.

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In March, 1981, in Vermont, Charlotte Bedford goes into labor. She has decided to give birth at home with the help of a midwife, Sybil Danforth, but complications develop. Charlotte has a seizure, her heart stops, and she does not respond to CPR. The fetus is still alive, so Sybil delivers him successfully by Cesarean section, with a kitchen knife. But the bleeding when Sybil makes the incision convinces her assistant that the patient’s heart was still beating. She reports this to the police and Sybil is put on trial for involuntary manslaughter.

The story of the trial is told by Sybil’s daughter, Connie, fourteen years old at the time and now an obstetrician-gynecologist. The acquittal comes at a price: the midwife finds herself no longer capable of delivering babies, and both she and her daughter are given a new insight into the uncertainty which underlies so many of medical decisions. At the end of the novel we are left uncertain whether or not Charlotte was still alive when her baby was delivered.

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Miss Armistead is a nurse in the surgical division of a hospital. She is being courted by two men, Dr. Joe Trask, the chief resident, and Dr. Mort Baker, an established and very successful surgeon. Everyone in the division is taking bets on her choice. Most assume she will choose Baker, the wealthier, more powerful doctor.

Then Miss Armistead develops appendicitis and requires emergency surgery. Joe Trask is on duty and has to begin the operation before Baker arrives, but experiences a terrible crisis of confidence, becoming helpless with fear. Baker arrives and completes the operation.

Everyone assumes that this will clinch Baker’s victory, but when Joe tells her how he was unable to operate on her, Miss Armistead takes this inability to see her as just another patient to be proof of the depth of his love for her, and agrees to marry him.

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This volume nicely supplements the few other anthologies of literature on medical themes currently available in that it covers a wider historical span. Selections from the Bible, Giovanni Boccaccio, William Shakespeare, Rabelais, as well as 18th-century writers including Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Malthus, Schiller, and Goldsmith provide an array of historical touchstones that offer windows onto medical and literary history and points of comparison for the larger selection of works from the 19th and 20th centuries.

The selections are mostly short--averaging around 10-12 pages. Each is introduced with lively, often witty, comments by Gordon, whose popular Doctor in the House series was adapted for stage and screen in England, and whose associations with the medical world include an editorial position on the British Medical Journal as well as a wife and two children who are physicians. Many of the selections focus on the figure of the physician viewed variously from the viewpoints of patients, other physicians, and him or herself.

Selections from novels by three Victorian women doctors as well as selections from several physicians’ diaries provide unusual additions to a useful collection of excerpts from well-known literature including works by Scott, John Keats, Jane Austen,George (Marian Evans) Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sinclair Lewis, F. (Francis) Scott Fitzgerald, Waugh, Orwell, and more recent and popular fiction, up through Erich Segal.

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Alcott briefly served as a nurse during the Civil War. These three brief "sketches" recount her experiences, though she gives herself a pseudonym and presumably embellishes her tale. The first sketch recounts her decision to become a nurse and her journey from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C. Despite her support of female equality, she finds her tasks go more smoothly when gentlemen help her.

The second sketch describes her job at the hospital. When the wounded are brought in, it is her duty to help wash and feed them, assist the doctors, and cheer the men up. She calls the men her "boys" and treats them maternally. In the third sketch, she falls ill herself and is brought home by her father.

In a postscript, she talks a bit more about the hospital. She criticizes its disorganized management and mocks the doctors, many of whom treat the patients as interesting problems to be solved rather than as people. Caring is left to the nurses. She mentions that she expected to be treated poorly by the doctors herself, but finds that they treat her well (though she also says they receive much better food and sleeping quarters). This section also contains lengthy reflections on the "Negroes" who help at the hospital.

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This unique "miscellany" of prose from journals and essays, poems, stories, music, paintings (reproduced in black and white), drawings, and cartoons illustrates countless ways that medicine and the arts, in tandem, "stretch the imagination, deepen the sympathy . . . enrich the perceptions" and give sheer, unadulterated pleasure. Organized by Robin Downie, renowned Professor Emeritus of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, the anthology is grouped in eight categories: "The Way We Are," "Disease and Mental Illness," "Doctors and Psychiatrists," "Nurses and Patients," "Healing," "Last Things," "Research," and "Ethics and Purpose."

Excerpts include the classic lore [Charles Lamb’s essay, "The Convalescent"; Florence Nightingale’s diary, "Notes on Nursing"; W. H. Auden’s poem, Musee des Beaux Arts (see this database); Theodore Roethke’s poem, In a Dark Time (see this database); C. S. Lewis’s journal, A Grief Observed (see this database); Sir Luke Fildes’s painting, The Doctor (see this database)] and refreshingly new nuggets from John Wisdom’s radio talk, "What is There in Horse-Racing" ("For a game of croquet is not merely a matter of getting balls through hoops, anymore than a conversation is a matter of getting noises out of a larynx,"); Robert Pirsig’s treatise, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"; physician Roy Calne’s tender sketches of his own patients; composer Richard Wagner’s letter, "Biscuits as Therapy"; Janice Galloway’s novel, "The Trick is to Keep Breathing"; and expressions by patients and artists who happen to be patients of their particular illness experiences.

Lest "commentary be intrusive," except as brief introduction to each section, Downie deliberately omitted them, placing illustrations and extracts so as to provide commentary on one another. (Readers cannot help but be stimulated, however, to rearrange and create their own juxtapositions.)

The section on "Healing" considers not only the expected operations, spiritual healing, traditional cures, music and art as therapy, but also "spells, hope, and mothers." Richard Asher’s essay on why medical journals are so dull (British Medical Journal 23 Aug. 1958), or on whether or not baldness is psychological, and the comic strips of Posy Simmonds (the double entendres of "Medical Precautions," the "Minor Operation" burlesque on Shakespeare’s "All the Ward’s a Stage,") remind us yet again that birthing, aging, illness and dying are not pathological events or mere medical processes, and that the arts and humanities are bountiful reservoirs of moral discourse, inspiration, and renewal.

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The story takes place in the town of Weston, the site of Weston Medical School, with its teaching hospital and private faculty clinic. The main characters are a group of seven men (six physicians and one administrator) who met while serving together in the Army during the Korean War and later joined to form the nucleus of Weston Medical School. These men all occupy prestigious positions as chiefs of various clinical departments and conduct lucrative private practices at the clinic.

Their wives meet regularly in what they call the "Dissection Club." While the women are said to be friends, their meetings consist primarily of backbiting, cattiness, and expressions of profound boredom. Mostly, they are bored with their sex lives. While the wives generally engage in small-scale infidelities (including a medical student in one case), Lorrie Delman, the wife of the biochemist, is exceptional because of her voracious sexual appetite, about which she is highly vocal. Lorrie obsessively "sleeps around." In fact, she proposes that the group devise a regular sequence of husband swapping, a suggestion that her friends vote down in favor of a more random approach to adultery.

The drama commences when Mort Delman catches his wife in bed with Paul McGill, the dermatologist. Delman shoots a single bullet that goes through Lorrie's back and chest, killing her (she is lying on top of Paul) and then lodges in her lover's heart. Marissa Feldman, the brand new female physician, accurately diagnoses and treats Paul's life-threatening cardiac tamponade in the emergency room, after which Anton Dieter, the cardiac surgeon, removes the bullet lodged in the victim's right ventricle. Needless to say, Paul McGill recovers uneventfully, and Drs. Feldman and Dieter engage in a sexual escapade.

Meanwhile, members of the "Dissection Club" begin to re-assess their lives and loves. After all, they conclude, any of their husbands could have been caught at Lorrie Delman's house having some "afternoon delight." Perhaps the wives should pay more attention to their husbands, or otherwise enhance the meaningfulness of their lives. While this is going on, Mort Delman, the biochemist-killer, has no fear of languishing in jail because he has a perfect "impassioned husband" defense. In addition, he also manages to pull off a scheme to extort money from the other physicians in return for his leaving town and not revealing everyone's secrets. If this isn't enough to whet your appetite, Doctors' Wives also features additional plot twists and a surprise ending.

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