Description

Spring, 1975,nine people met for the first time at Sugar Loaf Conference Center in Philadelphia to discuss the relationship between literature and medicine. These humanists were com­mitted to meet four more times during the next eighteen months. Contained in this book is the fruit of these discussions in the form of a dialogue—a dialogue interspersed with lyric statements in prose and poetry.

Participants in the dialogue: Nancy C. Andreasen, perhaps the “world’s only M.D./Ph.D. in literature,” who has evolved from critic and composition teacher to psychiatrist at the Uni­versity of Iowa College of Medicine. James C. Cowan, Univer­sity of Arkansas, is editor of the D. H. Lawrence Review and a frequently published Lawrence scholar. Ian R. Lawson, who got his medical training in Scotland, practiced there and in India before serving as Director of the Hebrew Home for the Aged and as a faculty member at the University of Connecticut.

Denise Levertov, a nurse in England before coming to the United States, is a major poet whose work is closely associated with the late poet/physician, William Carlos Williams. Harold Gene Moss is currently on the staff of the National Endowment for the Humanities: “From the patient’s point of view,” he notes, “the situation of serious illness is essentially tragic, but from the doctor’s sequential point of view, it is comedic.” William B. Ober, Director of Laboratories, Hackensack Hospi­tal, is the author of Boswell’s Clap and Other Essays: Medical Analyses of Literary Men’s Afflictions (Southern Illinois University Press, 1979).Richard Selzer, New Haven surgeon, essayist, and short-story writer, came to the dialogue with one book behind him, the second—in which a surgeon is celebrated—just ahead.

About the Author

Elizabeth Sewell, poet, novelist, literary critic, is also a meta­physician and magician.

Joanne Trautmann spends most of her time teaching litera­ture to medical students at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine and part of her time editing the Letters of Virginia Woolf.