Doctors in fiction: Lessons from literature

B Surawiczand B Jacobson (2009) • Oxon: Radcliffe Medical Press

Doctors are and, on the evidence of this book, always have been heavily represented in literature and the arts. The command over life and death clearly lends itself to fictional and dramatic depiction - even now the TV schedules are replete with representations from Holby to House, each conveying the issues and complexities of caring, contemporary cultural, ethical and legal mores, and community cohesion and clashes.

This book adds to the exponentially growing canon of arts and humanities literature tackling health and social care, providing (for want of a better word) a highbrow review.

Excerpts from classical texts featuring doctors and their works are included from prominent authors such as Camus, Chekov, Ibsen and Solzhenitsyn to enable readers to acquaint themselves with the situation and the specific social, medical, scientific or moral concern being addressed.

The chapters are arranged into discrete themes, each featuring at least two examples. Aspects concerned with the history of medicine may be read in the section, Early Docs, while the character of idealised doctors can be compared with those of dispirited ones in similarly titled chapters.

But where are the nurses?

Solzhenitsyn's Cancer ward features in the book and illustrates not only the crude environment of care in Stalinist Russia and the oppressive nature of the state machine, but also the bravery of spirit and the often blind hope of cure.

As a taster for the books this is excellent. As a commentary on the culture of medicine it is exemplary. It would be good to see such a literate account of medicine afforded to nursing, which is seemingly under-represented in the narrative accounts of professional and personal development.