On-Line Database of Literature, Arts, and Medicine: An Annotated Bibliography (review)

Reviewed by: On-Line Database of Literature, Arts, and Medicine: An Annotated Bibliography James C. Cowan (bio) On-Line Database of Literature, Arts, and Medicine: An Annotated Bibliography. Written by the Editors and Annotators. New York: New York University School of Medicine, 1996. 435 pp. Paperback, $35.00. This on-line database, here published as a large-format book, is an extensive, annotated bibliography on the arts and medicine, with separate sections devoted to art, film, literature, and information on the authors. Felice Aull, head of the New York University (NYU) Literature and Medicine Project, and her nineteen co-editors have provided twelve indices, including separate indices by keyword for art, film, and literature; indices of literature annotations by genre, era, author, title, and annotator; and indices of literature annotations of physician authors, men authors, women authors, and authors of selected ethnicity. On-line addresses are given for author information as well as literary texts and audio for most of the authors covered in the annotated bibliography. The On-Line Database can also be readily searched by a list of some 129 keywords, widely ranging over such topics as abandonment and abortion, marital discord and medical ethics, physical examination and psychosomatic medicine, sexuality and suffering, war and medicine, women’s health, and other medically relevant topics. The wealth of indexing tools provided for the database makes the bibliographical material very accessible and easy to use. It is obvious, however, that as broadly inclusive as the 1996 edition of the On-Line Database may be, it can be expected, like other on-going bibliographies, [End Page 268] to increase in size in subsequent editions. To keep up with additions to the bibliography as they are made, users may consult the new electronic editions published bi-monthly as the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, which can be reached at the NYU Medical School’s World Wide Web site: http://mchip00.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/medhum.html I had no trouble finding the twenty-second edition, on-line as of April 1997. In addition to sites you can click on for the art, film, and literature databases, three special sections are provided: The Listening Room, annotations with audio links; The Reading Room, annotations with on-line texts; and The Viewing Room, annotations with on-line art. Art-Design is by Julio Garcia, the Hippocrates graphic designer. As for the annotations accompanying the entries, the twenty-three annotators are necessarily restricted to giving a short list of keywords, a succinct summary of the work, and a brief commentary on it. It will be easy for almost anyone using the database to question the omission of other relevant literary works or of this or that detail in the annotations, as I found myself doing at various points, as in the following examples. Although the relation of a literary work to medicine or of medicine to an understanding of a literary work are likely to be the focus of most attempts to connect the two fields, I am not convinced that this relationship is to be best understood by channeling it into such discrete, pragmatic categories that one risks bypassing the humanities focus of the study. Literature is, by its very nature, a metaphorical art in both form and content. In the hands of a writer such as Richard Selzer, who is both a physician and a literary artist, surgery is something more than a skilled medical intervention. In the best sense of the term, both the surgical act and the body in which the incision is made become deeply metaphorical as well. For me, this sense of the indivisible science and art of medicine lies at the heart of medical humanities as a legitimate field of study. Sometimes, as I read the brief annotations, I could not help wondering at the slight attention given to the literary qualities of the works suggested for courses in Literature and Medicine. Is there no occasion in such a curriculum to notice, for example, the whimsy of Emily Dickinson’s slant rhymes or to consider how the almost telegraphic brevity of the audacious syntax of her poems is essential to her meanings? Similarly, shouldn’t Nathaniel Hawthorne’s...

Topic: Empathy and Medical Education
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences