Tag: Books and Reviews
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Queer and unked: Disability, monstrosity, and George Eliot’s “Sympathy”
Christina LeeKent, United Kingdom In The Mill on the Floss, the intellectual and sensitive Philip Wakem, who has a curved spine from a fall in infancy, is called “a queer fellow, a humpback, and the son of a rogue.”1(II.vi) In the manuscript Philip Wakem is branded “queer and unked.”1(V.v) “Queer” used here means “a state of strangeness and…
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Black man, white coat
Yeji LeeToronto, Canada There is a fine line between prejudice and experience, and it is a line that grows all the more important for someone who is a doctor. In his memoir, Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine, Dr. Damon Tweedy ushers his readers through his years in…
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Saul Bellow’s Doctor Adler: The achieving medical father and his non-achieving son
Solomon PosenSydney, Australia “I’ve learned,” old Doctor Adler lectures his oversized, untidy and bankrupt son, “to keep my sympathy for the real ailments” (42). Saul Bellow’s 1956 novella Seize the Day, arguably his finest work, is the story of a prodigal son (Tommy Wilhelm) who returns to his father, craving love as well as financial…
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Moreau’s mysterious creatures
The tale begins with a shipwrecked man who lands on a mysterious island filled with half human and half animal type creatures. From this, the novel seems a little ridiculous and even simplistic. But in actuality, H.G. Wells’ novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau, can be read as a story dealing with serious issues like religion…
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The truth in facts is a derelict ruin: Forging a self through fiction
Sara BakerAthens, Georgia, United States In his June 2, 2014 New Yorker article Inheritance,1 Ian Parker explores the connection between British novelist Edward St. Aubyn’s early traumatic life and his fiction. When we think of healing through writing, we usually think first of memoir and then perhaps of lyric poetry. Yet fiction offers advantages that…
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North and South and the intersections of environment and health
Roslyn WeaverSydney, Australia “Why, Mr. Thornton! You’re cutting me very coolly, I must say. And how is Mrs. Thornton? Brave weather this! We doctors don’t like it, I can tell you!” “I beg your pardon, Dr. Donaldson. I really didn’t see you. My mother’s quite well, thank you. It is a fine day, and good…
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The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and the diagnostic gaze as moral authority in The Great Gatsby
Rachel BrackenHouston, Texas, United States The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his…
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Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: About a whistling pneumothorax and pulmonary tuberculosis
Peter KorstenGöttingen, Germany Originally intended as a novella, Thomas Mann’s (1875–1955) multilayered novel The Magic Mountain documents in fine detail the methods used to treat lung diseases and especially pulmonary tuberculosis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, who intended to spend only three weeks in the sanatorium in the Swiss mountains…