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56 Medicine as Culture
mock Death. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) dealt with the moral issue
of humans usurping God as creator of the human body, while Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1897) focused on themes to do with the sexual body,
gender, death and immortality with a particular emphasis on the symbolic
nature of blood. It is telling that both these latter literary works
remain central in contemporary popular culture as horror stories, demonstrating
the resonance of their themes for audiences even today.
Representations of illness and disease in literature have closely followed
changes in medical discourses on the body. During the Romantic period the
creativity of the writer or artist was believed to emerge from suffering due
to travails such as serious illness. Above all illnesses, tuberculosis, a common
cause of death in the nineteenth century, was believed to stimulate the
creative impulse, fuelled by the early deaths from that disease of literary
figures such as Chatterton, Keats, Percy Shelley and Byron and the success
of the romantic and tragic operas La Traviata and La Bohème (Meyers, 1985:
4). With the advent of scientific medicine, naturalist writers in Europe
began to incorporate clinical descriptions of illnesses and neuroses into
their novels (Herzlich and Pierret, 1987: 29). By the twentieth century,
novels were beginning to include clinical discussions of illness and disease
to represent not only dissolution, decay and physical corruption but metaphysical
despair, loneliness, alienation and self-doubt (Meyers, 1985: 13). In
such writing, the medical treatment foisted upon the patient becomes torture
to be endured by sheer strength of will, while the existence of illness
forces characters to confront their mortality, the threat of nothingness
(1985: 13–14). Mann’s The Magic Mountain (dealing with tuberculosis), The
Black Swan (uterine cancer) and Death in Venice (a cholera epidemic) and
Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward are examples of such works.
Medicine, illness and death in popular culture
Representations of medicine, illness and death are not limited to elite cultural
texts such as literature and opera, but also routinely feature in the
popular mass media. Fictitious portrayals of doctors and other health professionals
and patients have been common in popular fiction and film and
particularly television dramas and soap operas since the 1950s. Successful
and often long-running television dramas since that time have included
the high-rating American Marcus Welby MD, Dr Kildare, St Elsewhere,
Doogie Howser MD, Chicago Hope and ER, and the British Dr Finlay’s
Casebook, Casualty, Cardiac Arrest and Peak Practice. In soap operas, sickness,
injury and death have provided vital themes for plots, especially
accidents and violent events, suicides, homicides, psychiatric disorders,
pregnancy-related conditions, heart disease and infectious disease
(Cassata et al., 1979). Medical breakthroughs and the personalized stories
of people suffering from disease regularly make newspaper headlines and
provide the basis of television and radio news and documentaries.