The Best Medicine: Stories of Healing

by Theodore Dalrymple

Overview

An inspired anthology about physical and psychological illness, healing, and healers—featuring a brilliant array of classic and contemporary writers, from Anton Chekhov to Lorrie Moore.

This unique anthology gathers fictional tales of sickness and of healing, both physical and psychological, from a wide variety of times and perspectives. Some of these writers were themselves physicians, notably Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov's story, taken from A Country Doctor's Notebook, draws on his early experience as a young doctor in rural Russia a century ago, while Anna Kavan's story, from her collection Asylum Piece, is based on her experience of mental illness. Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, J. G. Ballard, Robert Heinlein, Alice Munro, and Lorrie Moore are among the other writers of medical adventures that fill these pages. From Chekhov's "A Doctor's Visit" and William Carlos Williams's "The Paid Nurse" to Dorothy Parker's "Lady with a Lamp," O. Henry's "Let Me Feel Your Pulse," and Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," the stories gathered here are peopled by a colorful and varied cast of doctors, nurses, and patients.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593318584
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Series:	Everyman's Library Pocket Classics Series
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	677,607
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 7.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

THEODORE DALRYMPLE is a British cultural critic, prison doctor, and psychiatrist. He has practiced medicine in a number of sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the East End of London and in Birmingham. He is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. His work has also appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times (London), The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, and National Review, among others.

Read an Excerpt

PREFACE
 
Most people have experience of illness and everyone dies, so it is hardly surprising that matters of medical interest or concern are frequently to be found in literature. Many doctors have been writers, and many writers were the children of doctors: Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Proust spring to mind, but there have been others. Whole shelves of books have been written about the relationship of Shakespeare to illness and medicine.
 
Somerset Maugham, who trained as a doctor and whose first book recounts his experiences as a medical student delivering babies in the slums of London (he retained his licence to practise for decades after he gave up medicine so that he could continue to prescribe for himself), believed that a medical training was excellent for a writer because a doctor both enters the most intimate details of a patient's life and yet keeps at a distance, the observing eye never sleeping. The combination of empathic intimacy with distance – or ice in the heart, if you prefer - is just what a writer needs.
 
But if doctors observe patients, patients observe doctors – which they, the doctors, are sometimes inclined to forget. The doctor is therefore an important figure in many stories, and though I have done no scientific survey, I suspect that more portrayals of doctors are critical than admiring. The more-or-less useless doctor is a frequent figure in Chekhov, perhaps the greatest of all short-story writers. An active member of the profession himself, he was a close and not uncritical observer of his colleagues. (‘Medicine is my lawful wedded wife and literature is my mistress,’ he once wrote. ‘When I tire of one, I fly to the other.’)
 
Then, of course, there is illness itself. In the recent epidemic of Covid-19, many were the recommendations that, in our idleness, we should read Boccaccio, Defoe, Manzoni, Giono, Camus, among others, who made of epidemic disease the occasion of their work. Illness and mortality are made the moral teacher of humanity: we know that the deathbed is the only place in which Ivan Ilyich would ever survey his life.
 
Many writers had prolonged struggles with disease (‘this long disease, my life’ wrote Alexander Pope, which was not a whine of self-pity, but rather a pithy summing-up of his experience on earth).  In the twentieth century, writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and George Orwell were lost to tuberculosis at a young age: perhaps the intensity or urgency of what they wrote was in part a consequence of their chronic illness that kept mortality before their eyes.
 
Whether illness has any message for us is an open question. Some say yes, others say no: illness is just what it is, the working out of a pathological process in the human body, with no more moral lessons than the force of gravity has.
 
Nevertheless, as an essential experience of human existence, illness and the response to illness has been, and will always be, an important stimulus to reflection on what, in shorthand, is called the meaning of life, as I hope the following stories amply demonstrate.
 
                                                                    Theodore Dalrymple

Table of Contents

Preface
 
THE DOCTOR’S EXPERIENCE
 
Anton Chekhov, “A Doctor’s Visit”
Samuel Warren, “The Forger”
Elizabeth Berridge, “The Hard and the Human”
Arthur Conan Doyle, “Sweethearts”
Mikhail Bulgakov, “The Embroidered Towel”
Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Body-Snatcher”
J. G. Ballard, “Minus One”
Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies”
 
CONSULTATIONS
 
W. W. Jacobs, “Back to Back”
Guy De Maupassant, “A Coup d’État”
Graham Greene, “Doctor Crombie”
Anna Kavan, “Airing a Grievance”
W. Somerset Maugham, “Lord Mountdrago”
Julian Maclaren-Ross, “I Had to Go Sick”
Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling In Peed Onk”
 
DEALING WITH ILLNESS
 
Rudyard Kipling, “Swept And Garnished”
O. Henry, “Let Me Feel Your Pulse”
William Carlos Williams, “The Paid Nurse”
Joseph Conrad, “Amy Foster”
Dorothy Parker, “Lady With a Lamp”
Robert A. Heinlein, “Life-Line”
Rhys Davies, “I Will Keep Her Company”
Alice Munro, “The Moons of Jupiter”