Literature and Medicine
Fall 2014
ENG 58a
Prof. Sherman
email: davidsherman@brandeis.edu
office: Rabb 136
office hours: Thur 10-12, Fri 2-4, and by appt.
office phone: 781-736-8214
Class Schedule:
Tue / Thur 3:30-4:50
Hanh Bui, Teaching Fellow
email: hbui@brandeis.edu
office:
office hours:
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
…my ‘medicine’ was the thing which gained me entrance to these secret
gardens of the self.
— William Carlos Williams, Autobiography
This course will examine literary representations of physical and mental illness and the
experience of doctoring in order to pose several questions: how have writers represented and
given meaning to experiences of pain? What role does illness play in fashioning social identity?
How are acts of medical diagnosis and treatment culturally and politically complex, expressions
of conflicting values and understandings of the human? How has literature clarified the stakes of
biomedical ethical debates? We will examine literary responses to the body’s biological
vulnerabilities, and seek to contextualize the vulnerable body within the cultural and political
fields that shape medical knowledge and practice. Our reading—in fiction, poetry, essay, and
drama—will also suggest the art, or craftsmanship, involved in the healing sciences, as well as
the diagnostic nature of literary criticism. In other words, we will consider how careful, attentive
reading, which takes responsibility for its acts of interpretation, is itself at the heart of medical
practice.
Learning Objectives:
 to be able to explain the cross-disciplinary relevance of the medical sciences and
humanistic inquiry, or, put otherwise, to be able to articulate the relation between the
scientific and literary imagination—and, by implication, to acknowledge the role of
imaginative, speculative thought in the sciences
 to be able to write essays about how specific literary forms and techniques pose
significant questions and generate distinctive meanings related to bodily pain and doctorpatient relationships
 to be able to articulate how literature about illness and healing investigates issues in
medical ethics, and to use literature to clarify a debate in medical ethics
 to be able to analyze the narrative dynamics that shape experiences of illness and healing
Required Texts (at Brandeis Bookstore):
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Course Reader [CR]
Sophocles, Philoctetes (Harper Perennial, trans. James Scully)
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych (Melville Publishers, trans. Ian Dreiblatt)
Sharon Olds, The Father (Knopf)
Margaret Edson, Wit (Faber and Faber)
John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (Vintage)
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Mikhail Bulgakov, A Country Doctor’s Notebook (Melville House or Harvill, both trans.
Michael Glenny)
William Carlos Williams, The Doctor Stories (New Directions)
Thom Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Touchstone)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Knopf)
Hospital (dir. Frederick Wiseman), DVD, will be on reserve at Goldfarb.
Rules and Requirements:
 Laptops may not be used in class. Bring other materials (e.g., paper, pens) for taking
notes.
 All assignments must be completed and submitted to receive course credit. Late work
will be penalized by one plus/minus for each day past due date.
 Three unexcused absences lowers the final course grade by one plus/minus, and each
additional absence by another plus/minus.
 Plagiarism will be penalized by failure on the assignment or course, appearance before a
university committee, and/or expulsion.
 Students who wish to have reasonable accommodations made for documented disabilities
or Brandeis athletic obligations should speak to me immediately.
Grades and Assignments:
Thoughts and Questions (T&Q): Ten brief weekly comments and questions about readings, due
on LATTE the night before class. Due dates are listed in the schedule below and organized by
section. Credit/no credit. 2% each.
Medical Ethics Memo: Two short reports about medical ethics controversies at stake in our
readings. In 2-3 pages, provide information from reliable academic and journalistic sources
about the nature of this ethical controversy, including the scientific history, specific policy
questions, and prominent participants involved. Include a bibliography for your outside sources.
You do not need to adjudicate this debate, but you do need to present it clearly. In an additional
1-2 pages, show how some text from our syllabus engages some aspect of this debate. You do
not need to provide an exhaustive analysis of this text, but you do need to make a persuasive
gesture that the text is, however obliquely, thinking through some aspect of the controversy that
you have researched. Think of this as an argument that the ethical controversy you have
described is a useful context for understanding this literary text. Due 9/30 and 10/28. 15% each.
Interpretive Essay: 5-7 page essay of literary criticism, suggested topics to be distributed. Due
11/6. 20%
Final Essay: Over the entire semester, you will develop a final essay in a familiar, personal voice
about concepts of bodily pain, illness, doctoring, and health. This is not a formal academic
essay, but it is a rigorous intellectual essay; models from our own syllabus for this genre of
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creative, conceptually ambitious non-fiction include Biss, Woolf, Gawande, and Sacks. You will
draw from lived experience, the visual arts, literature, film, philosophy, and/or other fields in
order to come to insights about the world of medicine. These will be your insights, ideas deeply
embedded in your own individual processes of thinking, gathering, interpreting, speculating,
writing, revising, and so on. And these insights will be in response to a question or problem that
you have formulated and motivated. I want this to be a piece of writing that you care about.
This essay can draw on your work in previous LATTE posts, Medical Ethics Memos, and
the interpretive essay. The final essay will unfold in several steps, short ungraded exercises that
you will turn in throughout the semester:
1) Word Picture: a 1 page sensory description of an experience—your own or somebody else’s—
of bodily estrangement, pain, or distress. Due 9/4. Credit / No Credit.
2) Moment of Textual Fascination: a 1 page commentary on a passage, from our reading, that
you find powerful or strange. Due 9/18. Credit / No Credit.
3) Word Constellation: a hand-drawn web of association around a significant term or phrase that
you want to conceptualize. Due 10/21. Credit / No Credit.
4) Letter to a Friend: a 2 page letter to a friend, in a compelling voice, in which you explain a
question or problem about illness or healing that compels your attention, and how you are
beginning to understand it. Due 11/18. Credit / No Credit.
5) Rough Draft: at least 5 pages. Due 12/2. Credit / No Credit.
6) Final Essay: 7-10 pages. Due 12/10, noon. 30%
Extra Credit: Taking Biss’s essay “The Pain Scale” as inspiration, devise a pain scale, or set of
related scales. You can use any combinations of text, image, media, and genre. The scale should
capture the complexity of pain and suffering and give patients a chance to register some of the
nuances and contradictions of their experiences. In addition to the scale, write an explanation (23 pages) of your device in which you identify how your scale works, what failure of established
pain-scales that it responds to, and what dimensions of a patient’s experience it is uniquely able
to reveal. Points given for creativity. A grade in the A range will raise a final grade by a
plus/minus; a grade in the B range will raise the lowest essay grade by two pluses/minuses; a
grade in the C range will raise the lowest essay grade by one plus/minus. No credit under C
range. Due 9/30.
Discussion Sections:
We will hold class in discussion sections periodically over the semester: 9/16, 10/2, 10/13, 10/23,
11/4, 11/20. Rooms t.b.a.
Class Schedule:
Th 8/28
Introduction
Unit 1: Representing Pain, Narrating Illness
Tue 9/2
Biss, “The Pain Scale” [CR]
Hyperbole and a Half, “Boyfriend doesn’t have Ebola. Probably.” [link on LATTE:
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/02/boyfriend-doesnt-have-ebolaprobably.html]
Caruth, “Notes on Emphysema” [CR]
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Hacker, “The Migraine Sonnets” [CR]
Th 9/4: T&Q #1, section 1
*Word Picture Due*
Sophocles, Philoctetes
Tue 9/9: T&Q #1, section 2
Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illych
Olds, “His Terror,” “His Stillness,” “The Request,” “Psalm,” “The Last Day,” “The Exact
Moment of His Death”
Th 9/11: T&Q #2, section 1
Woolf, “On Being Ill” [CR]
Scarry, from The Body in Pain [CR]
Tillich, “The Meaning of Health” [CR]
Gaines, “The Sky is Gray” [CR]
Tue 9/16: T&Q #2, section 2
*Meet in Discussion Sections*
Edson, Wit
Olds, “The Look,” “The Lifting,” “Death”
Th 9/18: T&Q #3, section 1
*Moment of Textual Fascination Due*
Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
Wald, from Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative [CR]
Olds, “Death and Morality”
Tue 9/23: T&Q #3, section 2
Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions [“Meditations” 1-23]
Unit 2: Doctors, Heroes, Scoundrels, Fools
Tue 9/30: T&Q #4, section 1
*Medical Ethics Memo 1 Due*
*Extra Credit Due*
Gawande, “The Learning Curve” [CR]
Bulgakov, A Country Doctor’s Notebook (“The Embroidered Towel” through “The Speckled
Rash”)
Th 10/2: T&Q #4, section 2
*Meet in Discussion Sections*
Bulgakov, A Country Doctor’s Notebook (“The Blizzard” through “The Murderer”)
Tue 10/7: T&Q #5, section 1
Williams, The Doctor Stories (“Mind and Body” through “Jean Beicke”)
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Mon 10/13: T&Q #5, section 2
*Meet in Discussion Sections*
Williams, The Doctor Stories (“A Face of Stone” through “Comedy Entombed”)
Tue 10/14: T&Q #6, section 1
Charon, “The Patient, the Body, and the Self” (from Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of
Illness) [CR]
Adrian, “Grand Rounds” [CR]
Olds, “Letter to My Father from 40,000 Feet,” “I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died”
Tue 10/21: T&Q #6, section 2
*Word Constellation Due*
Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Parts One and Two)
Th 10/23
*Meet in Discussion Sections*
Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Parts Three and Four)
Unit 3: Hospitals
Tue 10/28: T&Q #7, section 1
*Medical Ethics Memo 2 Due*
Larkin, “The Building” [CR]
Olds, “The Struggle”
Marcus, “Notes from the Hospital” [CR]
Moore, “People Like that Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” [CR]
de Certeau, “The Unnamable” (from The Practice of Everyday Life) [CR]
Th 10/30: T&Q #7, section 2
Wiseman, dir. Hospital
Tue 11/4: T&Q #8, section 1
*Meet in Discussion Sections*
Chekhov, “Ward no. 6” [CR]
Th 11/6: T&Q #8, section 2
*Interpetive Essay Due*
Visiting lecture: Mike Hodgson, Cambridge Biomarketing
Unit 4: I Would Have Saved Them If I Could
Tue 11/11: T&Q #9, section 1
Schnackenberg, “Sublimaze” [CR]
Olds, “Last Acts,” “Last Kiss,” “After Death”
Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats (sections 1 and 2)
Th 11/13: T&Q #9, section 2
Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats (sections 3 and 4)
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Olds, “The Pulling,” “The Race,” “The Exam,” “The Cigars”
Optional: Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors
Tue 11/18: T&Q #10, section 1
*Letter to a Friend Due*
Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Part One, through p. 111)
Th 11/20
*Meet in Discussion Sections*
Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Part Two, through p. 203)
Tue 11/25: T&Q #10, section 2
Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (finish)
Olds, “Close to Death,” “The Dead Body,” “Death and Murder”
Tue 12/2
*Rough Draft of Final Essay Due*
Final Essay Workshop
Th 12/4
Final Essay Workshop; Conclusion
*Final Essay Due 12/10, noon*
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