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Informationen zum Autor THEODORE DALRYMPLE is a British cultural critic, prison doctor, and psychiatrist. He has practiced medicine in a number of sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the East End of London and in Birmingham. He is a contributing editor to City Journal , published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. His work has also appeared in The British Medical Journal , The Times (London), The Observer, The Daily Telegraph , The Spectator , and National Review , among others. Klappentext An inspired anthology about physical and psychological illness, healing, and healers--featuring a brilliant array of classic and contemporary writers, from Anton Chekhov to Lorrie Moore. This unique anthology gathers fictional tales of sickness and of healing, both physical and psychological, from a wide variety of times and perspectives. Some of these writers were themselves physicians, notably Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov's story, taken from A Country Doctor's Notebook, draws on his early experience as a young doctor in rural Russia a century ago, while Anna Kavan's story, from her collection Asylum Piece, gives us a surreal look inside a Swiss psychiatric clinic. Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, J. G. Ballard, Robert Heinlein, Alice Munro, and Lorrie Moore are among the other writers of medical adventures that fill these pages. From Chekhov's "A Doctor's Visit" and William Carlos Williams's "The Paid Nurse" to Dorothy Parker's "Lady with a Lamp," O. Henry's "Let Me Feel Your Pulse," and Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," the stories gathered here are peopled by a colorful and varied cast of doctors, nurses, and patients. Leseprobe PREFACE Most people have experience of illness and everyone dies, so it is hardly surprising that matters of medical interest or concern are frequently to be found in literature. Many doctors have been writers, and many writers were the children of doctors: Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Proust spring to mind, but there have been others. Whole shelves of books have been written about the relationship of Shakespeare to illness and medicine. Somerset Maugham, who trained as a doctor and whose first book recounts his experiences as a medical student delivering babies in the slums of London (he retained his licence to practise for decades after he gave up medicine so that he could continue to prescribe for himself), believed that a medical training was excellent for a writer because a doctor both enters the most intimate details of a patient's life and yet keeps at a distance, the observing eye never sleeping. The combination of empathic intimacy with distance – or ice in the heart, if you prefer - is just what a writer needs. But if doctors observe patients, patients observe doctors – which they, the doctors, are sometimes inclined to forget. The doctor is therefore an important figure in many stories, and though I have done no scientific survey, I suspect that more portrayals of doctors are critical than admiring. The more-or-less useless doctor is a frequent figure in Chekhov, perhaps the greatest of all short-story writers. An active member of the profession himself, he was a close and not uncritical observer of his colleagues. (‘Medicine is my lawful wedded wife and literature is my mistress,’ he once wrote. ‘When I tire of one, I fly to the other.’) Then, of course, there is illness itself. In the recent epidemic of Covid-19, many were the recommendations that, in our idleness, we should read Boccaccio, Defoe, Manzoni, Giono, Camus, among others, who made of epidemic disease the occasion of their work. Illness and mortality are made the moral teacher of humanity: we know that the deathbed is the only place in which...
List of contents
Preface
THE DOCTOR S EXPERIENCE
Anton Chekhov, A Doctor s Visit
Samuel Warren, The Forger
Elizabeth Berridge, The Hard and the Human
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sweethearts
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Embroidered Towel
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Body-Snatcher
J. G. Ballard, Minus One
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
CONSULTATIONS
W. W. Jacobs, Back to Back
Guy De Maupassant, A Coup d État
Graham Greene, Doctor Crombie
Anna Kavan, Airing a Grievance
W. Somerset Maugham, Lord Mountdrago
Julian Maclaren-Ross, I Had to Go Sick
Lorrie Moore, People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling In Peed Onk
DEALING WITH ILLNESS
Rudyard Kipling, Swept And Garnished
O. Henry, Let Me Feel Your Pulse
William Carlos Williams, The Paid Nurse
Joseph Conrad, Amy Foster
Dorothy Parker, Lady With a Lamp
Robert A. Heinlein, Life-Line
Rhys Davies, I Will Keep Her Company
Alice Munro, The Moons of Jupiter
