A Doctor’s Dictionary: Writings on Culture and Medicine Iain Bamforth Carcanet, 2014PB, 328pp, £15.29, 978-1784100568
The title of poet, medic, and writer Iain Bamforth’s new book and the radiological scan on the cover showing a glowing intestine suggest that we are in for a lexicon of clinical topics. Instead, we are treated to much more. This is a trove of scholarly essays, previously published elsewhere but brought together in a rich hoard of writing that mines European literature and philosophical thought on medicine and the culture it serves.
There is a masterly piece on Romains’ Knock, a play about a GP who imposes the ‘higher morality of health’ on previously contented villagers who do not yet ‘know’ that they are ‘ill’. There are essays on Kafka’s The Country Doctor, on liverish states and folk illness, on a poet undertaker, on being hospitalised with Stendhal’s syndrome — a consequence of being overcome by exposure to sublime art — on whether medicine is pledged more to the vivisecting optical scalpel of the eye than to the (listening) ear, and a further 20 other lettered essays. Value for money, certainly, and a motivation to read the writers and books that Bamforth quotes from.
There are occasions where Bamforth’s erudition stampedes with such unbridled momentum onto the page that I may not be the only one who needs to re-read a paragraph or look up unfamiliar words such as kulakism (Kulaks, a relatively affluent class of peasant farmers in Russia were exterminated by Stalin. The word has a link to meaning ‘tight-fisted’. Therefore, kulakism is perhaps a derogatory term perhaps meaning upstart, or greedy, peasant).
However, if this book is an intellectually-stretching read then it’s also a stimulating one. In the preface, Bamforth quotes the poet Robert Lowell:
‘Doctors are translators, interpreters, and sign readers, sure; but sometimes their simple presence counts for something else.’
If there is a unifying thread running through these essays it is perhaps the exploration of that ‘something else’ that we dimly, or sometimes with a startled epiphany, are aware of as we listen to patients, or as we stand back to think about our role in society as doctors.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2016
