Literature and medicine: the state of the field.
is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness-and the healthiest way of being ill-is one most purified of, more resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one's residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is toward an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry. -SUSAN SONTAG, Illness as Metaphor, 1979 JITERATURE AND MEDICINE, unlike literature and science (whose li "state of the field" was recently surveyed in this journal'), is not a field that has claimed significant numbers of students, certainly not of historians of science. This is not because medicine and literature interact less frequently or less intensely than science and literature, but because scholars-both literary historians and historians of science-have misunderstood or not been interested in the nature of the interaction. Moreover, medicine has made its appearance at unpredictable times in literature: in Lucretius's De rerum natura, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Johnson's Rasselas; in eighteenth-century English novels whose protagonists often suffer from fashionable diseases of the age, Goethe's dramatic poems, nineteenth-century English novels such as George Eliot's Middlemarch (in which Lydgate, a physician, epitomizes the whole European tradition of the physician); in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain; and in many plays in which some essential aspect of the medical profession is captured (as in the madhouse scenes in Ibsen's Peer Gynt or in Alan Dysart's psychiatric ward in Peter Shaffer's Equus). The literary historian or historian of science who specializes in a given epoch or period will not observe the entire curve of the interaction. The irony of this contrast-literature and science versus literature and medicine-is that medicine surely has far more than science to offer literature,