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New Directions
in Literature
and Medicine Studies

Edited by Stephanie M. Hilger

New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies
 Stephanie M. Hilger
Editor

New Directions
in Literature and
Medicine Studies
Editor
Stephanie M. Hilger
University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-51987-0 ISBN 978-1-137-51988-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51988-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948700

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material
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The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United
Kingdom
For Nayla
 Acknowledgements

The idea for this collection developed over the course of several seminars that
I (co)organized at the congress of the International Comparative Literature
Association (ICLA) in 2013 (Paris) and at annual meetings of the American
Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in 2014 (New York City), 2015
(Seattle), 2016 (Boston), and 2017 (Utrecht). The participants presented
work on different topics, yet they shared the objective of creating a dialogue
between the fields of literature and medicine and, more broadly, between
the humanities and the sciences. This discussion has existed since the incep-
tion of the field of literature and medicine in the seventies, yet it has had its
ebbs and flows throughout the decades. Recently, the necessity of this dia-
logue has resurfaced in the face of ever-shrinking resources and the abolition
of many of the institutional spaces for the exchange of ideas between human-
ists and scientists. The present volume presents the research by scholars keen
on maintaining and enlivening that dialogue. Although it gathers expanded
versions of some of the conference presentations, this volume is not a confer-
ence proceedings. Other prominent scholars in the field were invited to con-
tribute their current research, papers on specific topics were commissioned,
and some of the participants submitted different research than what they
presented at the conference seminars. As readers will see, the chapters in this
volume engage in dialogue not only with different disciplines but also with
each other. For that reason, they are grouped in thematic clusters that are rel-
evant for understanding both the separation of the disciplines and the ways to
reconnect them.
This type of project would not have been possible without the support of
the two institutions with which I was affiliated as I worked on this project.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, my permanent institutional
home, and New York University Abu Dhabi, where I held a visiting profes-
sorship from Fall 2013 to Fall 2014, both generously supported my travel to

vii
viii Acknowledgements

the above-mentioned conferences and provided logistical and financial sup-

port for work on the volume. Thank you to my colleagues at these institu-
tions who acted as a sounding board for my ideas and research. Thank you
also to my friends near and far—you know who you are—who provided
encouragement and support in many forms: intellectual, social, emotional,
and culinary. Thank you also to the contributors to this volume, whose work
inspired me, and to the editors at Palgrave, who believed in this project and
shared invaluable feedback at crucial points. And, finally, thank you to the
two most important people in my life, my husband and my daughter, who
was born while this volume was in the works; they always know how to make
me laugh. And, as the saying goes, laughter is the best medicine.
 Contents

Introduction: Bridging the Divide Between Literature

and Medicine 1
Stephanie M. Hilger

Part I History and Pedagogy

Reading and Writing One’s Way to Wellness: The History

of Bibliotherapy and Scriptotherapy 15
Janella D. Moy

Why Teach Literature and Medicine? Answers

from Three Decades 31
Anne Hudson Jones

Intellectual Cosmopolitanism as Stewardship in Medical

Humanities and Undergraduate Writing Pedagogy 49
Lisa M. DeTora

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Teaching

an Interdisciplinary Course on “A Cultural and Evolutionary
History of Sexuality” But Were Afraid to Ask 71
Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth and Ronald L. Mumme

Medical Professionalism: Using Literary Narrative

to Explore and Evaluate Medical Professionalism 99
Casey Hester, Jerry B. Vannatta and Ronald Schleifer

ix
x Contents

Part II Body and Mind

Mind, Breath, and Voice in Chaucer’s Romance Writing 119

Corinne Saunders

Affect and the Organs in the Anatomical Poems of Paul

Celan: Encountering Medical Discourse 143
Vasiliki Dimoula

Reading the DSM-5 Through Literature: The Value

of Subjective Knowing 165
Christine Marks

Anecdotal Evidence: What Patient Poets Provide 181

Marilyn McEntyre

“L’Œil Gauche Barré:” Migraine, Scotoma, and Allied

Disorders in Emile Zola’s Novels 203
Janice Zehentbauer

Part III Physical and Cultural Alterity

Corporeal Abnormality as Intellectual and Cultural Capital:

Jean Fernel’s Pathologiae Libri, Ambroise Paré’s
Des Monstres et Prodiges, and Michel de Montaigne’s Essais  223
Yuri Kondratiev

The Primacy of Touch: Helen Keller’s Embodiment of Language 243

Sun Jai Kim

Unsound Elegy: Breast Cancer in The Dying Animal

by Philip Roth and Elegy by Isabel Coixet 253
Federica Frediani

Reading Colonial Dis-ease/Disease in Hong Kong

Modernist Fiction 267
C.T. Au

Anandibai Joshi’s Passage to America (and More):

The Making of a Hindu Lady Doctor 281
Sandhya Shetty
 Contents xi

The Introduction of Moxibustion and Acupuncture

in Europe from the Early Modern Period to the Nineteenth
Century 305
Giovanni Borriello

Part IV Professionalization of Medicine

Midwives and Spin Doctors: The Rhetoric of Authority

in Early Modern French Medicine 319
Ophélie Chavaroche

The Changing Face of Quack Doctors: Satirizing Mountebanks

and Physicians in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England 333
Genice Ngg

Medical Tourism in Victorian Edinburgh: Writing Narratives

of Healthy Citizenship 357
Martin Willis

Doctor-Writers: Anton Chekhov’s Medical Stories 377

Carl Fisher

Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky’s Medical Plays: Chekhov

in Chicago 397
Maria Pia Pagani

Index 411
 Editor and Contributors

About the Editor

Stephanie M. Hilger is Professor of Comparative Literature and German
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also holds
appointments in French, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the European
Union Center. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century British, French,
and German literature, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary
approaches to literature. She is the author of Women Write Back: Strategies
of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790–1805
(2009) and Gender and Genre: German Women Write the French Revolution
(2014). She is also the co-editor of The Early History of Embodied Cognition
from 1740 to 1920: The “Lebenskraft” Debate and Radical Reality in German
Science, Music, and Literature (2015). She is currently working on a book
project, “Liminal Bodies: Hermaphrodites in the Eighteenth Century,” for
which she was awarded a faculty fellowship for study in a second discipline
and which investigates the representation of individuals born with ambiguous
genitalia in legal and medical case studies.

Contributors
C.T. Au is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural
Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. Her research interests
include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the comparative study
of modernist literature, and other disciplines, such as medicine, architecture,
fashion, cinema, food, travelogue, etc. She has published Modernist Aesthetics
in Taiwanese Poetry since the 1950s (2008) and numerous academic articles in
Chinese and English. Au is currently working on two research projects, one
on Hong Kong poet-novelist Leung Ping Kwan and the other on the major
modernist themes embodied in Macao poetry.

xiii
xiv Editor and Contributors

Giovanni Borriello holds a Ph.D. in History and Civilization of East Asia

from the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” He is Professor of History and
Cultures of East Asia and History and Institutions of Asia at Tuscia University
(Italy). An author of numerous publications and an active participant in
international conferences, he was awarded the Italian National Scientific
Habilitation as Associate Professor for the competition area “Cultures of
Central and East Asia.”
Ophélie Chavaroche is a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, currently
working as a “maîtresse de conference” at Sciences Po in Paris. After work-
ing on mental illness in twentieth-century women’s diaries at the University
of Paris VIII, where she earned her M.A. in Gender and Feminist Studies,
she is now looking at literary and medical texts from the sixteenth and
seventeenth century, focusing on subjectivity, embodiment, and self-care. She
is particularly interested in the works of Michel de Montaigne, Jacques Duval,
and Louise Bourgeois Boursier.
Lisa M. DeTora (Ph.D. Rochester, MS Albany Medical College) is Assistant
Professor at Hofstra University (New York). She specializes in STEM and
biomedical writing and medical humanities. She began a career in biomedi-
cal writing in 1993 and maintains a professional presence in societies for
medical publications and regulatory writing professionals. A volume spon-
sored by the Regulatory Affairs Professional Society will appear in 2017.
Lisa also serves as secretary for the Graphic Narrative research group of the
International Comparative Literature Association. Her most recent publica-
tions, which consider the role of ethics in biomedical publications, appeared
in the International Journal of Clinical Practice and Postgraduate Medicine.
Prior publications include work on trauma and commodity fetishism in young
adult novels, clinical pharmacology, molecular epidemiology, vaccines, rheu-
matology, feminist film theory, and medical rhetoric.
Vasiliki Dimoula is an adjunct lecturer in Comparative Literature at the
Open University of Cyprus, and a visiting scholar in the Department of
English at Princeton University. A revised version of her Ph.D. thesis,
Human and More than Human: The Problematic of Lyric Poetry, Ancient and
Modern, was published in 2014 by the Kostas and Helen Ouranis Foundation
(Athens, Greece). She has taught at King’s College (London), the University
of Cyprus, the University of Ioannina (Greece), and the University of
Vienna. Her published papers focus on romanticism, the classical tradition,
modernism, and literature and psychoanalysis. She was the recipient of a
Visiting Research Fellowship from the Seeger Center of Hellenic Studies at
Princeton University and a Fulbright Fellowship (University of New Mexico,
Department of Philosophy).
Carl Fisher is Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of the
Department of Human Development at California State University, Long
Beach. His specialization is eighteenth-century studies, and he has published
 Editor and Contributors xv

on Rabelais, Rousseau, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, and graphic satire in the

eighteenth century. He is working on two scholarly projects in Medical
Humanities, one on nineteenth-century women writing about medicine, and
another on the representation of illness in graphic novels. He is also develop-
ing an interdisciplinary and globally-oriented Health and Humanities degree
program for California State University, Long Beach.
Federica Frediani is Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Laboratory for
Mediterranean Studies at the Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland).
She also carries out research with the Department of Comparative
Languages, Literature, and Cultures at the University of Bergamo (Italy).
Federica Frediani earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (2005) from
the Università di Siena (Italy). Her research explores travel literature and
­women’s travel, with a focus on representations of the Mediterranean.
Casey Hester is the Pediatric Residency Program Director and the Vice-
Chair of Education for the Department of Pediatrics at the University of
Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City. She is an Associate
Professor of Pediatrics and holds the Presbyterian Health Foundation
Endowed Chair as well as an adjunct appointment in the Honors College
at the University of Oklahoma. She is a general pediatrician and Fellow of
the American Academy of Pediatrics. Dr. Hester has served as a preceptor in
the pediatric resident clinic for twelve years, twice receiving the Outstanding
Teacher Award. Her authored and co-authored peer-reviewed publications
have appeared in Pediatrics, Pediatric Emergency Care, and Pediatric Obesity,
and Enthymema (with Ronald Schleifer), among others. She has presented
both nationally and internationally on the Medical Humanities, including a
mini-course at the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education
Annual Meeting in 2015: Oh the Humanities! Utilizing Medical Readers’
Theater to Train on the Pediatric Professionalism Milestones.
Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth is an Associate Professor in the Department of
English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Allegheny College
(Pennsylvania) where she has been a faculty member since 2000. She
received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California,
Santa Barbara, her MA in English from Stanford University, and her B.A.
in Renaissance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She
teaches courses in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Her book, The
Reproductive Unconscious in Medieval and Early Modern England, was pub-
lished by Routledge Press in 2003. Her current research focuses on the inter-
section of literary production and the history of medicine and sexuality in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the Middle East. Her current book
project examines medicinal and magical remedies for managing the sexual
body in Medieval Arabic, Hebraic, and European Romance.
Anne Hudson Jones is the Harris L. Kempner Chair in the Humanities
in Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. When
xvi Editor and Contributors

Anne Hudson Jones joined the Institute for the Medical Humanities there,
in 1979, she became one of the first literary scholars in the USA to hold a
faculty appointment in a medical school. Since then, she has devoted her pro-
fessional life to the development of the medical humanities, especially litera-
ture and medicine. A founding editor of the journal Literature and Medicine,
she served as its editor-in-chief for more than a decade. She has published
numerous books and articles in the medical humanities, including in the pres-
tigious medical journal The Lancet. Her article, “Why Teach Literature and
Medicine? Answers from Three Decades,” reprinted in this volume, has been
recognized as one of the top three most frequently downloaded articles pub-
lished in 2013 and 2014 from the Journal of Medical Humanities, where it
appeared originally.
Sun Jai Kim holds an M.A. in English from Seoul National University.
She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, focusing on
nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Her areas of interest include
feminism, literature and medicine, crimes represented in novels and criminol-
ogy, and disability studies. She is currently working on her dissertation titled
“Towards A New Genealogy of Female Criminals Represented in British
Novels from the 1850s to the 1890s.” In it, she explores how British novels
such as Ruth, Adam Bede, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles
represent female criminal figures that anticipated the rise of the New Woman
at the fin de siècle.
Yuri Kondratiev holds a Ph.D. from Brown University. His doctoral dis-
sertation, “The Unruly Body or the ‘New Normal’: Renaissance Pathology
and the Literary Imagination,” focused on the early modern history of medi-
cine and literature. Adapting an interdisciplinary perspective, Yuri Kondratiev
strives to demonstrate the interdependence of the medical realm and the lit-
erary imagination by reexamining the major medical and literary corpora—
including Jean Fernel’s and Ambroise Paré’s writings, Montaigne’s Essais, and
Rabelais’ oeuvre. He is Visiting Assistant Professor of French language and
literature at Wheaton College, MA.
Christine Marks is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community
College (New York). She received her Ph.D. from the Johannes Gutenberg
University in Mainz (Germany). Her academic interests include contempo-
rary American literature, relationality, literature and medicine, and food and
culture. Her monograph “ I am because you are:” Relationality in the Works
of Siri Hustvedt was published by Winter (Heidelberg University Press) in
2014. She recently co-edited the volume Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri
Hustvedt’s works: Interdisciplinary Essays (De Gruyter 2016).
Marilyn McEntyre is Adjunct Professor of Medical Humanities at the UC
Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. She has written widely on intersec-
tions between medicine, literature, writing, and spirituality. Her recent books
 Editor and Contributors xvii

include Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out and two books on dying and
loss: A Faithful Farewell and A Long Letting Go. She has served on the edi-
torial board of Literature and Medicine and is a contributing editor at the
Online Database of Literature, Arts, and Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature from Princeton University and taught literature for
most of her career, but always recognized medicine as a personal road not
taken and sees the connections between language and healing as a vital part
of medical education.
Janella D. Moy is a doctoral candidate and instructor at Saint Louis
University. Her dissertation examines the changes in American women’s
utopian writing resulting from the conservative political environment of the
1980s and 1990s. Her research interests include women’s writing, spirituality,
bibliotherapy, and scriptotherapy. Moy previously had a successful career as a
trauma-certified emergency room nurse. Coming to academia and the field of
English after 10 years in nursing, Moy became interested in the acts of read-
ing and writing and their salubrious effects on the reader or author. Moy has
published on bibliotherapy and scriptotherapy.
Ronald L. Mumme received a B.A. in Biology from the University of South
Florida (1975) and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of California,
Berkeley (1984). Following postdoctoral work in the Section of Neurobiology
and Behavior at Cornell University and a teaching position in the Biology
Department at the University of Memphis, in 1990 he joined the faculty of
Allegheny College (Pennsylvania), where he is currently Professor of Biology.
His teaching and research interests focus on evolutionary biology, animal
behavior, and avian biology.
Genice Ngg is an associate professor at Singapore University of Social
Sciences and currently serves as the Dean of the School of Arts and Social
Sciences. She obtained her Ph.D. in English from McGill University
(Canada). She has presented papers on early modern mountebanks and is
working on satirical representations of quack doctors in the popular literature
and prints of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.
Maria Pia Pagani is Adjunct Professor of Theatrical Literature, Art of
Directing, Theatre Discipline at the University of Pavia (Italy). She is the
Italian translator of the doctor-writer and playwright Mikhail Berman-
Tsikinovsky and author of the introduction to his collected works, From
Russia for Good. A Collection of Plays (2011) and To Touch the Sky. Collection
of Prose and Dramas (2013). She is also the managing editor for Italy in the
international project “The Theatre Times,” and a member of the jury for the
Italian-Russian literary prize “Raduga.” She serves on the editorial advisory
board of The Apollonian: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (University of
North Bengal, India) and Stanislavski Studies (Rose Bruford College, UK).
xviii Editor and Contributors

Corinne Saunders is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre

for Medical Humanities at the University of Durham (UK). She specializes in
medieval literature and the history of ideas, with particular interests in mind,
body, and affect. She is a Co-Investigator on the Hearing the Voice project and
a Collaborator on the Life of Breath project, both funded by the Wellcome
Trust and based at Durham University. Her third monograph, Magic and
the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance, was published in 2010. Her
edited books include (with Jane Macnaughton and David Fuller) The Recovery
of Beauty: Arts, Culture, Medicine (2015) and (with Frank Brandsma and
Carolyne Larrington) Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind,
Voice (2015). She is English editor of Medium Ævum.
Ronald Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English and
Adjunct Professor in Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. He has writ-
ten or edited more than twenty books, the most recent of which are Pain and
Suffering (Routledge 2014); The Chief Concern of Medicine: The Integration
of the Medical Humanities and Narrative Knowledge into Medical Practices
(co-authored with Dr. Jerry Vannatta, Michigan 2013); Modernism and
Popular Music (Cambridge 2011); Medicine and Humanistic Understanding
(University of Pennsylvania Press, a DVD-ROM publication co-authored
with Jerry Vannatta and Sheila Crow); Modernism and Time (Cambridge
2000); and Intangible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge, and the
Power of Language (Minnesota 2009). He edited Genre: Forms of Discourse
and Culture for several decades and recently was interim co-editor of
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology. For many
years, he co-taught a seminar on “Literature and Medicine” with Dr. Jerry
Vannatta; he currently teaches it with Dr. Casey Hester.
Sandhya Shetty is Associate Professor of English at the University of New
Hampshire where she teaches postcolonial fiction, the nineteenth-century
British novel, and medicine and literature. She is completing a book on
the medical dimensions of culture and politics in colonial South Asia. Her
published essays encompass a range of subjects, including colonial obstet-
rical discourse, illness and nursing in MK Gandhi’s writings, gender and
nation, biopolitics, medicine and war, Caribbean and South Asian fiction.
These essays have appeared in collected editions and academic journals such
as Genders, Differences, Diacritics, Contemporary Literature, The Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and others.
Jerry B. Vannatta is David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus of Medicine and
Professor Emeritus of Humanities in Medicine at the University of Oklahoma
(OU). He is also adjunct professor of humanities in the Honors College at
OU. He is Clinical Professor of Medical Humanities at Oklahoma City
University (OCU), and Medical Director of the Physician Assistant Program
at OCU as well. He is a retired internist, is board certified in Internal
Medicine and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. Dr. Vannatta
 Editor and Contributors xix

served as Vice President of the University of Oklahoma for Health Affairs

and Executive Dean of the College of Medicine at OU from 1996 to 2002.
Dr. Vannatta, winner of numerous teaching awards, is co-author of a book-
length educational DVD, Medicine and Humanistic Understanding: The
Significance of Narrative in the Everyday Practices of Medicine, as well as other
articles covering various aspects of clinical medicine, medical education and
the humanities as they relate to the everyday practice of medicine. He is co-
author (with Ronald Schleifer) of The Chief Concern of Medicine (2013) and
of a chapter on Osler and Emerson in Osler’s Bedside Library, published by
The American College of Physicians’ Press.
Martin Willis is Professor of English at Cardiff University, where he has also
held an Honorary Senior Lectureship with Cardiff School of Medicine. He is
the Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science (2015–2018) and
founding Editor of the Journal of Literature and Science. He also leads the
ScienceHumanities Initiative at Cardiff University. He has written extensively
on the relationships between the humanities, the sciences and medicine, most
recently in Staging Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Literature and
Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He won both the BSLS Book Prize and
the ESSE Cultural Studies Book Prize in 2012 for his work in Vision, Science
and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons (Pickering & Chatto, 2011).
Janice Zehentbauer holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from
Western University (Ontario, Canada). She teaches writing for the School of
Communication and Literary Studies at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario.
Her research focuses on the history of medicine and neurology in nineteenth-
century literature. Currently, she is investigating the role of the hospital as
heterotopia in British Victorian literature and culture. Additional research
interests include theories of monstrosity in popular culture. She has published
“Lady of Perpetual Virginity: Jessica’s Presence in True Blood” (co-authored
with Cristina Santos) in Virgin Envy: The Cultural (In) Significance of the
Hymen (2016). She is completing a monograph entitled Scintillating Scotoma:
Migraine, Perception, and Double Consciousness in the Victorian Novel.
 List of Figures

The Changing Face of Quack Doctors: Satirizing Mountebanks

and Physicians in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century
England 
Fig. 1 An itinerant medicine vendor selling his wares from a stage
to a large audience in a town square. Courtesy
of the Wellcome Library, London  337
Fig. 2 Caricature of James Graham (center) with Gog and Magog,
the two footmen of Graham’s Temple of Health.
“The Quintessence of Quackism.” Courtesy of Cushing Center,
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University  346

xxi
 Introduction: Bridging the Divide
Between Literature and Medicine

Stephanie M. Hilger

On May 26, 1789, Friedrich Schiller held his inaugural lecture as a professor
of history at the University of Jena.1 Addressed to his fellow historians and
students, Schiller opposed the Brotgelehrte (bread scholar) to the philosophis-
che Kopf (philosophical head) (5).2 Schiller, who was known as much for his
contributions to German literature as for his historical writings, argued that
the scholar who works primarily to earn an income is interested in separat-
ing his discipline from all others so as to protect his academic territory and
carefully circumscribe his tasks. By contrast, the philosophical head incarnates
the Enlightenment ideal of the universal scholar, whose goal is to connect
his studies to different disciplines in an effort to insert them into the “wide
whole of the world” (große Ganze der Welt) (7).3
In his famous lecture, Schiller reacted to the gradually increasing disci-
plinary specialization that was underway in the eighteenth century, which
was putting an end to the de facto interdisciplinarity that had reigned until
the Early Modern period when the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy was
mapped onto and institutionalized by the separation of the sciences and the
humanities.4 Although Schiller specifically addresses his fellow historians, his
lecture highlights the inadequacy of any type of epistemological endeavor
that does not strive to understand the “connection between things” (Zusam-
menhang der Dinge) (7) by failing to embed discipline-specific knowledge
in a broader context. Schiller’s positing of the ideal of the philosophical
head, which had become especially important in understanding the social

S.M. Hilger (*)

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
e-mail: hilger@illinois.edu

© The Author(s) 2017 1

S.M. Hilger (ed.), New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51988-7_1
2 S.M. HILGER

and political turmoil on the eve of the French Revolution, acknowledges

the reality that, in the late eighteenth century, disciplinary boundaries
had become jealously guarded by those working within their comfort-
ing confines. Schiller’s reflections on scholarship and research were shaped
profoundly by the disciplinary rift that he experienced in his own life. In
addition to being a historian and playwright,5 Schiller was also a physician;
therefore, he had to straddle the gap between medicine and literature care-
fully and strategically.6 It is no surprise, then, that in his lecture he explicitly
mentioned medical doctors, alongside lawyers and theologians, as those suf-
fering especially acutely from the separation of their discipline from other
fields of knowledge that explore the human condition.7
Over the course of the nineteenth century, disciplinary specialization pro-
gressed and was institutionalized in the European system of higher education
and its eventual global dissemination by way of Anglo-American research uni-
versities.8 At present, disciplinary boundaries are visible on college campuses,
not only in separate buildings but also in entirely different geographical dis-
tricts for the sciences and the humanities. The situation that Schiller lamented
in the late eighteenth century literally has been set in stone. The academic
separation of the sciences and the humanities has made the scholarly explora-
tion of the connection between the various aspects of the human condition
difficult, not least in the discipline of medicine.
Medicine is not a hard science per se; rather, it is an interpretive approach
that combines scientific and humanities-based modes of knowledge. There-
fore, medicine also experiences what Catherine Belling has called the “herme-
neutic anxiety” (376) that informs humanities research. However, it is firmly
located among other science buildings, whose literal and figurative gates
are jealously guarded. The current academic focus on evidence-based medi-
cine further increases the distance between medicine and humanities-based
approaches to the human body by implying that the humanities do not pro-
duce real evidence. At the same time, however, there are increasingly more
calls for narrowing this distance. Reestablishing the connection between the
humanities and the sciences has become more important than ever before
because of global processes of corporatization that affect both health care
institutions and universities. Cost-efficiency in medical education has made it
increasingly difficult to offer courses that focus on the human aspect of medi-
cine within the medical curriculum itself. At the same time, the perceived cri-
sis in the humanities has encouraged literary scholars to underline the fact
that their work is not a self-referential field of inquiry but one that engages
and responds to broad social and political processes. As a result of the con-
vergence of these two trends, the need for interdisciplinary spaces in teach-
ing and research has grown in recent years. Although these two developments
have increased the urgency to reconnect what should never have been sepa-
rated in the first place, it is important to recognize that calls for rebuilding
the bridge between the sciences and the humanities are not a recent develop-
ment, as Schiller’s lecture demonstrates.
 INTRODUCTION: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN LITERATURE … 3

The most forceful calls for bridging disciplinary divides occurred in the
1970s, when the practice of literature and medicine gained ground as a reac-
tion to the transformation of medical schools into high-powered research
centers in the previous decade. As Anne Hudson Jones outlines in her con-
tribution to this volume, Edmund Pellegrino called upon medical educators
to refocus their attention on the moral dimension of medicine. At the same
time, Joanne Trautmann Banks highlighted the necessity of “read[ing], in
the fullest sense” to increase medical practitioners’ “tolerance for ambigu-
ity,” with the goal of improving patient care (36).9 With the establishment of
the journal Literature and Medicine in 1982, these interdisciplinary scholarly
endeavors found a home. The name of the journal reflected the reality that
the majority of these interdisciplinary ventures originated in literature depart-
ments. In addition, literature, in the sense of belles lettres, is perhaps the most
“humanistic” of all humanities disciplines because it is often considered a pro-
duction of art for art’s sake. However, the contributors to the first issues of
the journal demonstrated the exact opposite of this common notion. In fact,
Rita Charon vehemently argued against the instrumentalization of literature
to provide medical doctors merely with “a civilizing veneer” (Narrative Med-
icine 226) by pointing out that writing a poem or quoting a philosopher does
not necessarily make one a better doctor. Many of the early scholars work-
ing in the field focused on the textual features not only of literature but also
of other types of discourse, including medical texts. One incarnation of this
practice is Rita Charon’s concept of “narrative medicine,” which puts medical
practitioners face to face with the textuality of their patients’ experiences.10
These close reading practices were geared at simultaneously uncovering the
textual dimension of medical discourse and demonstrating that literature does
not constitute a self-referential aesthetic discourse but a powerful vehicle for
social commentary.
Gradually, the designation “literature and medicine” became limiting in
view of other humanistic approaches to medicine (e.g., history, philosophy,
theology), whose main focus was not necessarily medicine’s narrative dimen-
sion. As a result, the designation “medical humanities” began to be used with
increasing frequency. The founding of journals such as Medical Humanities,
published by the Institute of Medical Ethics and the British Medical Jour-
nal in the UK (2000), and the Journal of Medical Humanities, based in the
Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado (1981),11
signaled the expansion of the field and its increasing academic institutionaliza-
tion. More recently, as Paul Crawford et al. have observed, “medical humani-
ties” has been replaced by “health humanities” to encompass not only the full
range of disciplines involved in the delivery of healthcare but also the patients
themselves.
This brief overview shows that even though there is some slippage between
the designations “literature and medicine,” “narrative medicine,” “medi-
cal humanities,” and “health humanities,” they are not synonymous; each
highlights a specific approach in the effort to overcome strict disciplinary
4 S.M. HILGER

separations.12 The focus of this volume is on “literature and medicine” in par-

ticular. I am using “literature and medicine” not as a synonym for the medical
and health humanities or as an earlier incarnation of it but as a present-day
subset of the medical and health humanities that focuses specifically on the
dialogue between literature and medicine. The discipline of comparative lit-
erature has been particularly productive in establishing such a dialogue. On
the one hand, it encourages interdisciplinarity through its comparative focus;
on the other, it questions the boundaries of literary discourse. As Jonathan
Culler argues, “Since literature is not a natural kind but a historical construct,
the study of literature in relation to other discourses is not only inevitable
but necessary” (241). At the same time that literature comments on other
disciplines, other disciplines also try to answer the questions typically high-
lighted in literature, as Fedwa Malti-Douglas observes: “Perhaps what makes
the world of medicine and science potentially richest for comparatists is that
physicians, biologists, and other scientists are presently grappling with prob-
lems that previously were thought to be the purview of traditional humanities
disciplines” (181). In this sense, comparative literature is, as Michael Swa-
cha posits, embedded in “the larger project of the humanities: to study and
wrestle with the experience of being human across the multiple contexts and
scales of existence … when the study of literature is not necessarily for the
sake of literature itself, when it instead feeds some larger question, so too
does the role of literary study expand.”
In their common focus on the human condition in all its manifestations,
be they physical or otherwise, the disciplines of literature and medicine call
to be reconnected. The “and” in the designation “literature and medicine”
is productive in both its strength and its flexibility as it accommodates chang-
ing priorities and concerns. Scholars and teachers of literature and medicine
have been exploring a wide range of interrelated topics: narrative medicine
(the analysis of the narrative dimension of patients’ and doctors’ stories),
the therapeutic uses of reading and writing literature (biblio- and scriptother-
apy), writing about disease (pathography), the pedagogical uses of literature
courses in the medical curriculum, the role of doctor-writers, the represen-
tation of the medical encounter in literary texts, the medical case history as
a literary genre, and changing literary depictions of disease, just to name a
few of the most prevalent areas of inquiry. At the same time that “literature
and medicine” is an open field of inquiry that nimbly adapts to changing
research priorities and different historical and cultural contexts, its flexibility
also means that it resists comfortable and definitive institutionalization. It
is always defined by the scholars practicing it and shaped by their research
expertise, training, and interests. Therefore, it should come as no surprise
that the background of the contributors to this volume is extremely varied,
including not only literary scholars but also medical doctors, a nurse-turned-
literary scholar, a biologist, a former medical publications coordinator, and a
literary scholar active in hospice care. Even though these researchers investi-
gate a wide range of topics, what unites their work is their interdisciplinary
 INTRODUCTION: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN LITERATURE … 5

epistemological approach, making them present-day incarnations of Schiller’s

ideal of the philosophical head: “Not what he does but how he approaches
what he does, differentiates the philosophical head. Wherever he stands
and works, he is always standing in the middle of everything” (“Nicht was
er treibt, sondern wie er das, was er treibt, behandelt, unterscheidet den philoso-
phischen Geist. Wo er auch stehe und wirke, er steht immer im Mittelpunkt des
Ganzen”) (10). Being in the middle is represented by the “and” connecting
the disciplines of literature and medicine. The experience of interdisciplinarity
can be profoundly unsettling because nobody ever completely feels at home
in more than one discipline. Yet, it is precisely this productive disorientation
that leads to innovative scholarly insights.
This volume is divided into four parts, each of which focuses on one par-
ticular way of reconnecting the disciplines of literature and medicine and,
by extension, the humanities and the sciences. The contributors to the vari-
ous parts explore the creation and consolidation of disciplinary separations
in discourses from a variety of historical and cultural contexts. At the same
time, they present ways of thinking that challenge those same boundaries and
encourage the broader effort to build interdisciplinary bridges by engaging
other approaches, such as gender, disability, and postcolonial studies. The
background of the contributors is varied with respect to not only their aca-
demic specialties but also the cultural and intellectual context from which
they write. In addition, the work of junior researchers is presented alongside
that of senior scholars who have been pioneers in the field of literature and
medicine.
The first part consists of five chapters discussing the history and pedagogy
of literature and medicine. These two aspects are closely intertwined because,
as an academic endeavor, the practice of literature and medicine informs schol-
ars’ research agenda and shapes their teaching, which, in turn, produces more
scholars interested in pursuing such interdisciplinary connections.13 Janella
Moy locates the origins of literature and medicine in the practices of biblio-
therapy and scriptotherapy in the wake of World Wars I and II and traces the
roots of these practices back to Antiquity. Anne Hudson Jones surveys the his-
tory of literature and medicine, its gradual development into medical humani-
ties, and the uses of the comparative method in both research and teaching.
Lisa DeTora explores the dialogue between undergraduate writing pedagogy
and medical humanities through the concepts of stewardship and textual cos-
mopolitanism that allow for understanding disciplinary boundaries while tran-
scending them. In their co-authored chapter, Jennifer Hellwarth and Ron
Mumme reflect on the successes and challenges of team-teaching an interdis-
ciplinary course on literature and the medicalization of sexuality, with particu-
lar respect to dominant institutional structures and the knowledge segregation
they (re)produce. In the last chapter of this part, Casey Hester, Jerry Vann-
atta, and Ronald Schleifer discuss how to teach medical professionalism by
putting literature to work in pursuit of the Aristotelian ideal of phronesis—the
virtue of practical knowledge that leads to a good life.
6 S.M. HILGER

The chapters in the second part explore the dualism of body and mind, its
effect on disciplinary specialization, and attempts to overcome this separation.
In her contribution, Corinne Saunders investigates the description of mind,
breath, and voice in Chaucer’s medieval romances. By mobilizing the notion
of affect, Saunders demonstrates that the suffering of Chaucer’s protagonists
can be understood in the context of a pre-Cartesian body-mind continuum
rather than a framework that opposes mind to matter. Saunders urges readers
not only to rethink common conceptions regarding the Middle Ages, espe-
cially with respect to gender, but also to question strict biomedical frame-
works for unexplainable phenomena. Vasiliki Dimoula pursues a similar line
of inquiry in her reading of Paul Celan’s twentieth-century poetry through
the notions of affect and subjectivity. Her chapter explores the intersection of
neuroscience with psychoanalysis through the trope of the organ and thereby
builds a bridge between the sciences and the humanities in a post-Cartesian
context. Similarly, Christine Marks investigates the tension between scien-
tific positivism and phenomenological knowledge by establishing a dialogue
between the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and con-
temporary autobiographical accounts of those suffering from mental illness.
By doing so, she not only elucidates the autobiographical subject’s suffering
but also reads the medical manual against the grain. Marilyn McEntyre fur-
ther probes the phenomenological dimension of illness in her analysis of con-
temporary poetry by patients suffering from a variety of diseases. She argues
that these poetic expressions of pain provide the type of anecdotal evidence
that could make a decisive difference in the course of healing because they
complement statistical data and other forms of “hard” evidence for medical
professionals. McEntyre’s reading of Linda Pastan’s poetic descriptions of
her migraines highlights the brain as the connection between body and mind
in a similar manner to Corinne Saunders’ chapter on Chaucer’s medieval
romances and Vasiliki Dimoula’s reading of Celan’s poetry. Migraines are also
the focus of Janice Zehentbauer’s analysis of the fiction of the French natural-
ist Emile Zola. In Zola’s novels, the migraine sufferer exemplifies the paradox
peculiar to this liminal mind-body borderland, in which senses are heightened
yet vision is blurred. Migraineurs embody the nineteenth-century nervous
figure; their suffering constitutes an individual expression of pain at the same
time that it comments on changes in the public sphere of modernity, with its
new forms of entertainment, urban life, social degeneration, and questioning
of traditional gender roles.
The capacity of individual bodies to comment on the body politic also
informs the chapters in the third part, which focuses on physical and cultural
alterity as the experience of self and other. Alterity questions the strict separa-
tion between the sciences and the humanities by necessitating the creation
of a hybrid disciplinary space for its discussion. Yuri Kondratiev’s chapter on
the Early Modern thinkers Jean Fernel, Ambroise Paré, and Michel de Mon-
taigne highlights the still fluid boundaries between mind and body as well as
 INTRODUCTION: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN LITERATURE … 7

scientific and humanistic thinking in the sixteenth century. By investigating

the representation of physical alterity in the works of these thinkers, Kondra-
tiev demonstrates that their writings functioned as cultural capital in both the
literary and scientific realm. The investigation into abnormal and monstrous
bodies was part of an epistemological project to understand these aberra-
tions, yet it also exposed the limits of empirical reasoning when it intersected
with the power of the imagination. A non-normative body also stands at the
center of Sun Jai Kim’s chapter on Helen Keller, the first deaf-blind person
to earn a college degree, in 1904. In traditional discourse, Helen Keller has
been constructed as an angelic and child-like figure who transcends the physi-
cal dimension of her existence because of her disability. However, an analysis
of her autobiographical work The World I Live In demonstrates that it is pre-
cisely the tactile experience caused by her disability that allows her to express
her physicality and sexuality in ways that challenge traditional ways of concep-
tualizing bodily experience. The sexual dimension of a non-normative body is
also discussed in Federica Frediani’s chapter on Philip Roth’s novel The Dying
Animal (2001) and Isabel Coixet’s cinematic adaptation of it. These liter-
ary and cinematic texts about a body altered by the effects of breast cancer
simultaneously engage in and resist the sentimental culture of mainstream dis-
course by either downplaying or highlighting the concrete physical manifesta-
tions of the disease.
Alterity is experienced in the encounter with not only differently abled
bodies but also different cultures. Such cross-cultural encounters blur the
boundary both between scientific and humanistic approaches and between
body and mind. C.T. Au’s chapter on the tension between colonial realities
and traditional Chinese values in Hong Kong modernist fiction highlights
the permeability of mind and body, especially in the discussion of men-
tal disease. In addition, the discussed texts, in particular Xi Xi’s description
of breast cancer treatments in Mourning My Breast (1992), demonstrate
the limits of Western medicine and question the strict separation between
scientific and humanistic approaches. Sandhya Shetty further explores
cross-cultural encounters in a colonial context in her chapter on the strate-
gic self-positioning of Anandibai Joshi, a young Brahmin (child) wife from
Western India, who, in 1883, received a medical degree from the Women’s
Medical College of Pennsylvania. As a Brahmin woman doctor who did not
convert to Christianity, Anandibai Joshi’s transnational emergence compli-
cates territorial and conceptual fixities inscribed within the historiograph-
ically-influential notion of colonial medicine, conventionally assumed to be
coterminous with the geography of British India and substantially reliant on
an official archive. In a colonial context, the movement of medical knowl-
edge typically is assumed to occur from “West” to “East,” with the colo-
nized adopting, or being forced to adopt, the colonizer’s medical tools. Au’s
and Shetty’s chapters complicate this common notion by emphasizing the
multidirectionality of knowledge exchange in an epistemological space that
8 S.M. HILGER

questions the division of the world into East and West in a colonial setting.
Giovanni Borriello’s chapter on knowledge transfer in the Early Modern
period highlights this multidirectionality in a pre-colonial context. Borriello
describes European travelers’ depictions of the Asian practices of acupuncture
and moxibustion, the combustion of leaves of mugwort right above the skin.
Even though the scientific and philosophical dimensions of these practices
fascinated Europeans travelers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth cen-
tury, they did not find their way into (alternative) medicine in the “Western”
world until very recently.
Early Modern scientific curiosity is also explored in the fourth part on the
gradual professionalization of medicine and the emerging distinction between
medical doctors and different types of lay practitioners, which itself served
to consolidate the separation of scientific and humanistic approaches to the
human body and mind. Ophélie Chavaroche traces the strengthening posi-
tion of the surgeon in Early Modern France. Focusing on emerging male-
midwives Jacques Duval and François Mauriceau, Chavaroche explores their
assertion of authority in narratives that blur the strict boundaries between
scientific and autobiographical discourse. By reading these texts not only
for their historical value but also for their rhetorical strategies, Chavaroche
uncovers the process by which the agency previously held by women in the
birthing chamber—the mother and the midwife—is gradually transferred to
a male authority figure. The changing medical profession is also the topic of
Genice Ngg’s chapter on physicians and mountebanks in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Like surgeons who sought to delegitimize midwives
during the birthing process in Early Modern France, professional organiza-
tions such as the College of Physicians attempted to discredit other types of
medical practitioners in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. How-
ever, their efforts at establishing a strict boundary between licensed physicians
and unlicensed medical practitioners were subverted as licensed physicians
were mocked as part of a pretentious elite and characterized as “quacks” in
popular forms of entertainment, such as broadsides, satires, and plays. The
boundary between licensed and non-licensed medical practitioners gradually
consolidated and was institutionalized through the hospital as the guarantor
of authorized medical care. The hospital’s function was not limited to this
particular role, as is demonstrated in Martin Willis’ contribution on medical
tourism in Victorian Edinburgh. Victorian travel guides employed the skills
of literary writing to help carve out a space in the national consciousness for
medical science, embodied by the hospital, as an important actor in promot-
ing Edinburgh (and Scotland) as a place of progressive civic values. Reflec-
tions on the medical profession and its institutions occur not only from the
outside but also from within, as the works of one of the most famous doc-
tor-writers, Anton Chekhov, demonstrate. Carl Fisher surveys the nineteenth-
century Russian author’s best-known stories and explores his ambivalent
representation of the medical profession through a focus on narrative per-
spective and the question of empathy, which prefigures many of the debates
 INTRODUCTION: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN LITERATURE … 9

in current medical humanities. The figure of Chekhov looms large in dis-

cussions of literature and medicine, as demonstrated in Maria Pia Pagani’s
chapter on the medical plays of contemporary author and physician Mikhail
Berman-Tsikinovsky. In his plays, Berman-Tsikinovsky fictionalizes his own
immigrant experience in the United States. Chekhov in Chicago is particularly
revealing of Berman-Tsikinovsky’s style because, in it, he fuses fictional char-
acters with historical and fictionalized historical characters. Through a meta-
theatrical mechanism based on Luigi Pirandello’s style, the play depicts a
fictionalized version of Chekhov as Berman-Tsikinovsky’s alter ego, living and
practicing in 1990s Chicago.
The chapters on Chekhov and Berman-Tsikinovsky bring the collection
full circle as they feature prominent doctor-writers reflecting on the m­ edical
profession. Like Schiller, these authors bridge the divide between literature
and medicine in their own work. By doing so, they demonstrate the perme-
ability between the sciences and the humanities more broadly. In fact, all
the chapters in this volume show that, at the same time that dualisms are
­established—between the sciences and the humanities, mind and body, self
and other, and specialist and non-specialist—those same dualisms are inter-
rogated by those whom Schiller calls philosophical heads. This designation
applies both to the authors studied in the chapters in this collection (rang-
ing from medieval English to contemporary Hong Kong authors) and to the
scholars who study them and who are the contributors to this volume.
Schiller’s emphasis on the connection between various realms of knowl-
edge is embodied by the “and” in the designation “literature and medicine.”
The connection between these two realms is constantly changing, making it
an extremely dynamic and productive field of inquiry. In this sense, the pre-
sent volume can be used in different ways to explore various directions and
developments in the field. Readers can first peruse those chapters that most
directly appeal to them due to their own research interests. Then, at a later
time, as they continue to engage the field, they can return to the volume and
read other contributions. So, for example, instructors in a medical p ­ rogram
might design a course on the foundations of clinical medicine with a unit
on the representations of medical doctors in literature. They would read the
section on the history and the teaching of the field (by DeTora, Hellwarth,
Hudson Jones, Mumme, Hester et al.) and the various chapters ­discussing
practicing physicians (Au, Fisher, Pagani, and Shetty). Similarly, an Early
Modern literary scholar new to the field could turn to the various articles
on the Early Modern period (Kondratiev, Chavaroche, Boriello, and Ngg).
A non-academic reader interested in the topic of migraines would read the
­articles by Marilyn McEntyre, Corinne Saunders, and Janice Zehentbauer.
Multiple thematic or methodological threads can be followed in this way,
allowing readers to weave their own web of interdisciplinary connections,
becoming philosophical heads themselves and, in turn, contributing to the
dynamism of the field of literature and medicine.14
10 S.M. HILGER

Notes
1. “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?” [“What
does universal history mean and to what end does one study it?”].
2. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.
3. The male pronoun is chosen on purpose here because it reflects the reality that,
despite Enlightenment ideas and ideals regarding equality, in practice women
were largely excluded from academic positions and scholarship.
4. In this context, Elisabeth Grosz argues that “Descartes distinguished two kinds
of substances: a thinking substance (res cogitans, mind) from an extended sub-
stance (res extensa, body)” and that, as a result of this distinction, he “suc-
ceeded in linking the mind/body opposition to the foundations of knowledge
itself” (6): “Dualism … is also at least indirectly responsible for the historical
separation of physiology from psychology, of quantitative analysis from qualita-
tive analysis, and the privileging of mathematics and physics as ideal models of
the goals and aspirations of knowledges of all types” (7).
5. For scholarship on Schiller as a historian and the connection to his literary pro-
duction, in particular his historical tragedies, see, among others, Dann, Hoff-
mann et al., Kerry, Kimura, Prüfer, and Saranpa.
6. Schiller’s medical training and his role as a physician have been garnering
increasing critical attention during the past decade. See, for example, Engel-
hardt, Schäfer and Neuhausen, Sutermeister, Weiss, and Werner.
7. “The legal scholar no longer enjoys his studies as soon as the light of better
culture shows him their shortcomings … The physician doubts his profes-
sion as soon as important mistakes demonstrate the unreliability of his sys-
tems; the theologian loses the respect of his profession as soon as his belief
in the infallibility of his teachings vacillates” [“Dem Rechtsgelehrten entleidet
seine Rechtswissenschaft, sobald der Schimmer besserer Kultur ihre Blößen ihm
beleuchtet … Der Arzt entzweiet sich mit seinem Beruf, sobald ihm wichtige
Fehlschläge die Unzuverlässigkeit seiner Systeme zeigen; der Theolog verliert die
Achtung für den seinigen, sobald sein Glaube an die Unfehlbarkeit seines Lehrge-
bäudes wankt”] (Schiller 8).
8. Menand et al. provide an insightful account of the ways in which German uni-
versities shaped Anglo-American research institutions.
9. Among her many publications, Trautmann Banks’ Healing Arts in Dialogue
(1981) and The Art of the Case History (1992) have been the most influential.
10. In Charon’s expansive body of work on the topic of narrative medicine, see in par-
ticular Narrative Medicine (2006) and Stories Matter (with Martha Montello, 2002).
11. The Journal of Medical Humanities was first published under the title Bioethics
Quarterly (1981). In 1982, the name was changed to the Journal of Bioeth-
ics. Then, in 1985, it became the Journal of Medical Humanities and Bioethics,
before it assumed its current title, Journal of Medical Humanities in 1989.
12. For a more detailed history of the field, see Hudson Jones in this volume. Also
see Cole et al., Carson et al., Evans et al., and Jones et al.
13. See, for example, the Teaching Literature and Medicine collection, edited by Anne
Hunsaker Hawkins and Marilyn McEntyre, two of the pioneers in the field.
14. See Crawford, Shapiro, Puustinen, Carson et al., and Evans et al. for some
reflections on the future of the field in different settings and academic contexts.
 INTRODUCTION: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN LITERATURE … 11

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Menand, Louis, Paul Reitter, Chad Wellmon. The Rise of the Research University:
A Sourcebook. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2017.
Pellegrino, Edmund. “To Look Feelingly—The Affinities of Literature and Medicine.”
Literature and Medicine 1 (1982): 19–23.
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 At last the signal was given and the party entered another room,
where a table had been laid in European style.
The menu was as follows:—
Roast pigeons, stuffed chickens, stewed lamb, turkey with
almonds, and highly flavoured siksu[47]; olives in oil; oranges cut in
sections and spiced, served as a vegetable; salad of olives and mint;
eggs poached with olives and oil; chicken fricassée, with a rich egg
sauce; chickens with red butter—a piquante sauce; stewed mutton
with fried eggs; chickens stewed with almonds and sweetened.
Dry siksu; rice made up in a sort of porridge; bowls of new milk;
almond tart, flavoured with musk; pastry dipped in honey.
Dessert: oranges, almonds, raisins, nuts, and fourteen dishes of
confectionery, including ‘kab ghazal,’ or gazelle hoofs, little cakes of
that form, from which they take their name, made of pastry thickly
iced and filled with a concoction of almonds.
A pleasant preparation of unripe figs, much resembling chutney,
was served with the stewed lamb.
The only beverage was water, slightly flavoured with musk and
essence of citron flowers.
Of this menu the turkey, the fricassées of chicken and the dry
siksu, were pronounced excellent, but some of the other dishes were
horrible concoctions.
The servants reported afterwards that as many dishes as had
been served remained outside untasted; but that the steward,
observing how little was eaten, promptly brought the banquet to a
close and produced coffee, well made, but curiously flavoured. After
dinner the ladies were invited to visit the harem, whither Sid Musa
proceeded to conduct them. Through the horseshoe arch of the
entrance showed a large court planted with orange-trees, illuminated
by the full moon and by numerous lanterns held by black slave girls.
Here, picturesquely grouped, the gorgeously apparelled ladies of the
harem awaited them. A stream of dazzling light from a room on one
side of the court played on the glittering jewels with which they were
loaded, producing altogether quite a theatrical effect.
The courteous, gentle manners of these Moorish ladies and their
soft voices were very attractive. The coloured women were even
more remarkable on this score than the white, who were probably
wives of inferior caste married to Sid Musa before he rose to his
present position of rank and importance, for the ‘Hajib’ was a mulatto
—one of the Bokhári, previously alluded to.
In connection with these Bokhári, their rise and fall, the following
tale was often related by Sir John:—

‘In the days of Mulai Sliman one of the Bokhári had risen, through
his merits and by the favour of his lord, to be Master of the Horse, a
much coveted post at the Court, as it conferred great dignity and
ample emoluments on the holder. Accordingly, in the course of time,
he amassed great wealth and possessed much property and many
wives and slaves.
‘Unfortunately, in an evil hour, he one day gave cause of offence
to his Royal Master, traduced possibly by others who were jealous of
his influence and the favour hitherto shown him; or, perhaps,
forgetful of his rôle as a courtier, he spoke his mind too freely at an
inopportune moment. Whatever the cause, the angry Sultan roundly
abused him, dismissed him from his post as Master of the Horse,
and ordered him to be gone from his presence.
‘Bending low, the Bokhári replied, “Your will, my Lord. May God
preserve the life of the Sultan,” and retired.
‘The following Friday, as the Sultan rode back to the palace from
the chief mosque, whither he had gone in state to take part in the
public prayers at midday, he observed a tall Bokhári sweeping the
courtyard and steps leading to the palace. Struck by his appearance,
the Sultan ordered the man to approach, inquiring who he was;
when, to his Majesty’s surprise, he discovered in the humble
sweeper his late Master of the Horse.
 ‘“What do you here?” asked the Sultan.
‘Prostrating himself in the dust, the Bokhári exclaimed, “I am my
Lord’s slave! Since the Sultan—whose life may God prolong!—has
dismissed me from my post of honour about his person, I am only fit
to undertake the duties of the lowest of my fellows.”
‘Needless to add, the wily courtier recovered the favour of the
Sultan and was reinstated in his post.’

One afternoon was devoted to returning the visits of the various

dignitaries, and amongst others that of the Uzir Sid Dris Ben Yamáni,
a Minister without a portfolio, as Sid Musa had usurped his functions.
At the gateway of the Uzir’s house the visitors dismounted, and
were conducted by a black slave through a pretty garden, by paths
paved with coloured tiles and shaded by vines on trellises. At the
end of a long path a scene was presented which had evidently been
carefully prepared for the occasion.
In a small ‘kubba,’ seated on a chair, was the Uzir, apparently
deeply engrossed in reading a pile of letters and documents which
lay open on another chair before him. A female slave stood in the
background, with bent head and folded hands. Sir John approached,
but the Uzir continued his occupation, as if too deeply engrossed to
hear or see any one. Not till the party were quite near him did he
start from his seat, as if taken unawares, to receive Sir John and bid
him and all welcome; then directing the slave to remove the
documents with care, he led the way to a prettily furnished room
looking on a small court.
The last visit was to the Governor of the city, who received Sir
John at the door of his dwelling. He was a handsome young man,
scarcely past boyhood, with a decided—but cruel—expression. His
father, Ben Dawud, the late Governor, who had died only a few
weeks previously, was detested by the populace, whom he cruelly
oppressed. It was generally believed that Ben Dawud had been
poisoned, by order of the Sultan.
 The young Basha took Sir John by the hand and led him across
the courtyard to a ‘kubba,’ furnished with tables and chairs, whence
was perceived—with dismay—preparations for a feast in an opposite
room. The young man, who seemed shy, was much relieved when
Sir John inquired what sort of a garden he had, and immediately led
the way to another very large square court. On two sides of it were
rooms; the exquisitely chiselled archway of a fountain occupied the
third, and the fourth contained a beautiful little alcove, where the
Kaid of our guard and the escort were seated enjoying tea. The floor
of this court shone like ice, and was as white, smooth, and slippery.
The boy-Governor explained that it was composed of a fine white
clay found near Marákesh.
While in this garden, so called from the orange-trees, flowering
shrubs, roses and jasmine which adorned it, Sir John asked whether
the painted ceilings and doors were the work of natives of the city.
The Governor replied that what they saw was ancient, and, at a hint
from his secretary, he offered to show them some rooms he was
adding to the house, also the view from the flat roof. Up narrow and
steep stairs they climbed to various unfinished chambers, the
ceilings of which did honour to the modern artists of Marákesh.
Then, after a scramble, they reached the terrace over these rooms,
which, being higher than the surrounding buildings, afforded us a
lovely view of the whole city and the country around, the effect
greatly enhanced by the deep red glow in the west, left by the setting
sun, that seemed to set the graceful palms on fire as they stood out
against the beautiful Atlas Mountains, whose snowy ranges glowed
in varying tints of rose and purple.
On descending the visitors were conducted to the banquet
prepared for them and, with the best grace they could assume,
submitted to their fate.
On April 23 Sir John had a final private audience of the Sultan, to
take leave. An account of this, his last interview with Sultan Sid
Mohammed, was written by Sir John as follows:—
 The Sultan received me in a ‘kubba,’ where he was seated on a
divan. As I approached, His Majesty, motioning me to a gilt arm-
chair, placed close to the divan, requested me to be seated; he then
dismissed the chamberlains and other attendants. Thus we were
alone.
After a friendly conversation and thanking the Sultan for the
hospitality and attention received during my stay at the Court, I said,
‘With Your Majesty’s permission, I am about to put a strange query.’
‘Kol’—‘Say on,’ said the Sultan, ‘for I know, whatever you say,
yours will be the words of a true friend, as you have ever been.’
‘Then,’ I continued, ‘I beg to know whether Your Majesty would
desire to listen to the language of flattery, to words that will give you
joy and pleasure, to expressions of satisfaction and admiration of all
I have seen and learnt during my long residence in Your Majesty’s
dominions; or whether Your Majesty would elect that I should speak
out the truth and make known, without reserve, that which may give
Your Majesty pain, distress, and even, it may be feared, offence?’
The Sultan, looking very grave, replied, ‘This is the first time in my
life that I have been asked by any man whether I would choose to
hear what might give me pain, or even offence, or to listen to that
which may please or flatter me. I select the former.’
I bowed and said, ‘Before I proceed further, will you graciously
promise not to take offence at the language I am about to hold, and
that I shall not lose Your Majesty’s good opinion and friendship
through rashness of speech?’
The Sultan repeated, ‘Say on. You have been, are, and will ever
remain a true friend.’
 ‘I will premise,’ I then said, ‘by declaring that the administration of
the Government in Morocco is the worst in the world.’ The Sultan
looked startled and frowned. ‘The present system and form of
government were not introduced by Your Majesty—nor indeed by
your sire or grandsire—and therefore Your Majesty is not responsible
for the wretched impoverished state of this fine country and of the
population over which Your Majesty reigns. The form of Government
was inherited from your forefathers. After their withdrawal from Spain
—where, for centuries, they had led the van of the world in art,
science, literature and agriculture—they set aside, on their return to
the “Moghreb,” the just laws and administration of Government which
had made them the grand people they were, and—I will add—might
become again. Their descendants inherit the same blood, bone, and
brain; therefore it is to be inferred that, under a just Government,
with security of life and property, the Moorish people might again rise
and become, as their ancestors were, one of the richest and most
powerful nations in the world.
‘At the present time the Government of Morocco is like a
community of fishes. The giant fish feed upon those that are small,
the smaller upon the least, and these again feed on the worms. In
like manner—the Uzir and other dignitaries of the Court, who receive
no salaries, depend for their livelihood upon speculation, trickery,
corruption, and the money they extort from the Bashas of provinces
and other Governors.
‘The Bashas likewise are enriched through peculation from tithes
and taxes and extortion from Sheikhs, wealthy farmers, and traders.
A man that becomes rich is treated as a criminal. Neither his life,
property, nor family are secure.
 ‘Sheikhs and other subordinate officials subsist upon what they
can extort from the farmers and peasantry.
‘Then again, even the gaolers, who are not paid, gain their
livelihood by extorting money from the prisoners, who, when they are
paupers, are taught to make strong baskets, which are sold by the
gaolers chiefly for their own benefit.
‘How can a country—how can a people—prosper under such a
form of Government?
‘The tribes are in a constant state of rebellion against their
Bashas. When the Sultan resides in his northern capital of Fas, the
southern tribes rebel; and when he marches South to the city of
Marákesh, eating up the rebels and confiscating their property, the
northern tribes rebel. The armies of the Sultan, like locusts, are
constantly on the move ravaging the country—to quell revolt.
‘Agriculture is destroyed. The farmers and peasantry only grow
sufficient grain for their own requirements, and rich lands are allowed
to lie fallow because the farmers know the crops would be plundered
by the Bashas and Sheikhs. Thus it happens also with the cattle and
horses; breeding is checked, since the man who may become rich
through his industry is treated as a criminal and all his possessions
are taken from him. As in the fable, the goose is killed to get the
golden eggs.
‘With dominions as extensive as those of Spain or France, with a
rich soil which can produce all that can be grown in Europe, Morocco
is poor and weak—even compared with the lesser nations like
Denmark or Holland, which kingdoms do not possess a third of the
land Morocco has; while, half the year, the ground in these Northern
countries is covered with snow and ice. Yet they have revenues
tenfold that of Morocco, highly disciplined armies, and formidable
navies: they have roads, bridges, railroads, with cities and towns
containing palaces, handsome well-paved streets lit by gas, and
other modern improvements, such as are to be seen in the largest
capitals of the world. The just administration of the laws and security
of life and property have produced this state of welfare, and the
people are content and happy and do not rebel. The wealth of these
countries is always on the increase. No Sovereign, Minister,
Governor, or other high official can take from any man a stiver of
money, or an inch of land. Every officer employed by the Sovereign
is paid, and therefore does not depend for his livelihood, as in
Morocco, upon peculation, extortion, bribery and corruption.’
The Sultan here remarked that his subjects were an ignorant and
lawless people, quite unfit to be governed in the lenient manner I had
described; that unless they were treated with the greatest severity
and were not allowed to enrich themselves, they would show a more
rebellious spirit than they do even at the present time. A lenient
administration, he repeated, was not suited to the wild races of
Morocco.
To this I replied, ‘At Your Majesty’s request, I applied in past years
to the British Government for permission to allow two hundred of
Your Majesty’s subjects to be sent to Gibraltar, for the purpose of
being instructed in the drill and discipline of the British foot-soldier.
The British Government acceded to Your Majesty’s request; a body
of two hundred Moors was sent to Gibraltar and remained there
between two and three years, the men being occasionally changed
as they acquired a knowledge of drill. I wish to know whether Your
Majesty selected these men from a superior, educated class, who
had the reputation of being orderly and intelligent, or whether they
were chosen after inquiry into their intelligence, past character, and
behaviour?’
 The Sultan replied, ‘No; the men were selected at random from
various tribes, so that there might be no ground for jealousy.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘two hundred Moors remained for nearly three years
at Gibraltar. They had good clothing given them, and a quarter of a
dollar (a shilling) a day was allowed each man by Your Majesty. The
British Government gave them tents to live in. During the time they
were stationed in Her Majesty’s garrison there were only two cases
in the police court against them for dissolute conduct. Colonel
Cameron, under whose superintendence they were placed, said they
learnt their drill as quickly and well as Englishmen. They were sober,
steady, and attentive to their duties. (“With 20,000 such men I could
march to Madrid to-morrow,” said the Colonel.) This tends to show
that Your Majesty’s subjects, living under a just and humane
Government, having, as these had, proper provision made for their
livelihood, are not a lawless or even disorderly people, and that they
are capable of being transformed, under a good Government, into
the grand warriors which their ancestors were in Spain.’
The Sultan smiled, and said, ‘“Hak”—True. Your arguments are
certainly convincing. Point out the remedy. Select the man from
amongst my Wazára (viziers), or other officers of the Court, on whom
you think I could depend to introduce a new form of administration. I
believe,’ he continued, ‘that if I were to tell my Wazára that, for the
future, I should allot them and other officers of the Court salaries,
and put a stop to bribery and peculation, they would be the first to
rebel against my authority and to oppose any change in the
administration.’
I replied, ‘I know not the Uzir, or other persons in authority, whom I
could suggest should be employed to aid in carrying out a reform in
the Government. Your Majesty—like the late Sultan Mahmud of
Turkey and the great Khedive of Egypt, Mehemet Ali—will have
yourself to take the sword in one hand and the balance of Justice in
the other.
‘Make an example of any man who dares to oppose Your
Majesty’s will and determination to improve the state of your
subjects. The latter, when they learn Your Majesty’s desire for their
welfare, will rise in a body to support you in getting rid of the tyrants,
who are now grinding them into dust and squeezing out their life-
blood.
‘In the cause of humanity and to save the lives of thousands of
men, women and children, now impoverished and starved by a cruel
system of extortion, Your Majesty will have to act with great severity
and make a manifest example of some of the Uzirs and Bashas, thus
striking terror into the hearts of other dignitaries of your Court, who
may be inclined to oppose your reforms.
‘Can I speak out,’ I then asked, ‘without risk of my words being
publicly reported?’
‘Speak,’ said the Sultan; ‘what passes now between us shall be
kept secret.’
‘If,’ I then continued, ‘I were chief Uzir and elected by Your
Majesty to carry out the proposed reforms, I should probably cause
more heads to fall in a month than have been cut off during the
whole of Your Majesty’s reign, and still I should feel that I was acting
humanely by saving the lives and property of the innocent, and
promoting the welfare and happiness of the millions over whom Your
Majesty reigns. A cancerous disease can only be arrested by the
knife, in the hands of a skilful and humane surgeon. But publish to
the world that I have held such language, and the so-called
humanitarians of my country would demand my recall as British
Minister in Morocco.’
‘Prepare for me,’ said the Sultan, ‘a secret memorandum on the
form of Government you would propose, the salaries to be paid to
the Uzir and chief officers of my Court, to Bashas and other officials
in the provinces. I will take it into consideration and commence
gradually to introduce reforms in the administration of the
Government of the provinces; and then I shall, in due course,
introduce reform also at the Court by the payment of the Uzir, &c.,
and punish severely peculation or corrupt practices.’
I gave the Sultan a rough outline of the first steps that should be
taken by payment of Governors and other functionaries to collect
taxes and tithes—to be paid direct into the Treasury, and not through
the Governors—recommending that receipts should be delivered to
all persons who paid taxes, &c., and that these collectors should also
be empowered to take all fines, imposed by Governors or Sheikhs
on criminals, and pay them into the Treasury, which would tend to
check the rapacity and injustice of Governors in imposing heavy and
unjust fines, which at the present time they appropriate to their own
use.
I reminded the Sultan that it was at my suggestion, when the
Convention of Commerce of 1856 was concluded, that the salaries
of the Customs Officers were greatly increased and, at the same
time, steps taken to prevent the wholesale robbery of the receipts of
Custom; and that he, the Sultan, had told me that, since my advice
had been followed, the revenues derived from the Customs had
greatly increased.
The Sultan said, ‘Yes, I remember, and also that I have said that
since the conclusion of the Convention of 1856 with Great Britain,
though we pay half the revenues of Customs to Spain on account of
the war debt, and a quarter, on account of a loan received, to Great
Britain, yet the amount of revenue paid into the Treasury at the
present time is greater than before the conclusion of that
Convention, and the trade of Morocco with England and other
countries has trebled in value.’

· · · · · ·

‘The day after this conversation with the Sultan,’ writes Sir John, ‘I
left Marákesh. The camp was to be pitched about twelve miles from
the city, and we started early in the morning. About an hour later, one
of the escort, looking back, exclaimed, ‘I see a horseman coming
along the plain at full gallop. I should think he is a messenger from
the Court.’ And thus it proved.
‘I have been dispatched,’ said the breathless horseman, ‘by the
Uzir, Sid Mohammed Ben Nis (the Minister of Finance) and the
Sheríf Bakáli, who have been ordered by the Sultan to convey to
Your Excellency a message from our Lord; and they wish to know
whether they are to continue their journey to the camp or whether
you might be disposed to await their arrival on the road?’
‘See,’ I replied, ‘there is a fig-tree near the road, I will sit beneath it
and await the Uzir and the Sheríf: go back and tell them so.’
Sending on the rest of the party, I, with one of my daughters and
two of the escort, awaited the functionaries, who arrived about a
quarter of an hour after I was seated.
Ben Nis began the conversation as follows:—
‘This morning I was sent for by the Sultan, who ordered me to
convey to you the following message:—His Majesty said he had not
slept all night, but lay awake pondering over all you had said to him;
that he feels more convinced than ever that you are a true friend of
himself and his people, and, I am desired to add, His Majesty thanks
you.’
I replied, ‘Convey to His Majesty the expression of my gratitude
for having deigned to dispatch such high functionaries with the very
flattering message you have now delivered. It is a great consolation,
for I learn thereby that His Majesty is satisfied that what I have said
was solely prompted by feelings of good-will and friendship.’
Ben Nis remarked, ‘The Sultan was in such a hurry to dispatch us
that he had not time to tell us the language you had held to His
Majesty, and which had prevented him from sleeping, so I shall feel
obliged if you will communicate it to me.’
‘It would not,’ I replied, ‘be regular or proper that I should make
known to any one, without the Sultan’s consent, the confidential
communication I have had the honour of making to His Majesty. Go
back, and say such was my reply to your request, and you can then
ask His Majesty, if you please, the purport of our conversation.’
Ben Nis looked sullen and angry, but the Sheríf smiled and said,
‘The Bashador is right. It is for the Sultan to tell us, if he will.’
Ben Nis then observed, ‘The reason why I am very anxious to
know what passed yesterday is, that after your long private
audience, the Sultan gave orders that all the Wazára and chief
officers of the Court, as also the Bashas of provinces who happen to
be at Marákesh, should assemble in the Meshwa (Court of
Audience).
‘When we were all assembled, His Majesty appeared and
addressed us thus:—
 ‘“You are all a set of thieves and robbers, who live by peculation,
bribery, corruption and plunder. Go away!”
‘All present at the Meshwa therefore drew the conclusion that the
language you may have held had caused His Majesty to thus
harangue us.’
To this I replied, ‘Go, as I said before, and ask His Majesty to tell
you of the language I held to him. I cannot and shall not do so.’

The return journey from Marákesh to Mogador afforded no new

features of special interest. On May 2 the sea was reached. Miss
Hay describes her father’s entry in her diary:—
‘We were met by the Lieutenant-Governor of the province of Haha
and a large body of horse, who after the usual salutations formed up
in our rear. Again another body of mounted men appeared, led by
the Governor of Haha in person. As the latter advanced to greet Sir
John, a number of horsemen, who had been concealed on the road
in front, dashed forward at a gallop and passed us, firing. This
startling form of salute was intended to convey a compliment.
‘Next came the Governor of the town with another troop of horse
and personally attended by a number of running footmen. Drawn up
on one side of the road was a long irregular line of wild mountaineers
on foot, all armed with long guns and handsome daggers, their blue
and white jelabs kilted short—so as not to impede their movements
—by means of gay leather belts, and bedizened with many and gay
leather pouches and bags.
‘Before these mountaineers stood a tall old man playing on a reed
flute, a sweet and harmonious, though scarcely a warlike instrument,
but a great favourite with all the native mountain tribes. The various
troops of horse having fallen in, the open plain presented a beautiful
and animated sight. Flying either past or to meet us, came every
moment the charging troopers in their brilliant flowing drapery, firing
when close to Sir John. In front of us moved the mountaineers, also
firing as they performed the different and curious gun-dances of their
tribes; or, if natives of Sus, twirling and throwing their loaded guns
and naked daggers high in the air to catch them as they fell.
‘The whole town had turned out to see the show, and when we
came within sight of the walls, the batteries fired a salute, to which
responded the joyous “zagharit” of the women who thronged
beneath the walls.
‘During this ceremonious entry a curious incident occurred. One of
the escort cried ‘Jackal!’ and, slinking along before us, we saw one
of these beasts hurrying away. In a moment, dignity and etiquette
were forgotten, and Sir John, followed by all the riders of our party
and a number of the troopers, dashed in pursuit. They followed till
the jackal reached a hollow among the sands, where the Moors
pulled up, saying there was a quicksand at the bottom which would
bear a jackal but not a horseman.
‘Beneath the walls, Sir John was received by the civil
functionaries, mounted, as became men of peace, on sleek mules.
The crowd was now so dense that the escort had to force a passage
through the people to enable us to enter the town gates, which were
shut immediately after, to keep back the rabble for a time. The
terraces and balconies of the houses were crowded, principally with
Jewesses attired in all the splendour of their rich native dress. We
rode to the Consulate, where we stayed the night, and next day re-
embarked on board H.M.S. Lively.
‘It was Sir John’s intention to call at some of the ports on his
return voyage, and Saffi—more correctly E’Sfi, or “the pure”—was
the first to be visited.
‘Off this port we arrived early the following day in fine weather,
though a heavy sea was rolling on to the shore from the Atlantic. The
landing however was effected without difficulty, in spite of the rocks
which beset the entrance to the little port. On these rocks men were
stationed who directed the boat’s course, by shouts and signs,
through the narrow passage, and warned them when to pause and
when to take advantage of a lull between two high waves.
‘Sir John met with a cordial reception from the authorities, and a
banquet was offered to the Mission by the British Vice-Consul and
residents; but just as the party had seated themselves at table to
enjoy their kindly hospitality, a messenger arrived in haste to say the
sea was rising, and, if we wished to regain the ship, not a moment
must be lost. The result was a hurried flight to the beach, where two
large surf-boats, manned by natives, were prepared. Into these the
party were stowed, each person having first been provided with a
life-belt by a kind resident, though had any accident occurred, the
life-belts could only have floated bruised and mangled bodies
ashore, so numerous and cruel were the rocks on all sides. The bar
continued to rise, and the authorities and residents tried to dissuade
Sir John from attempting to cross; but he, knowing what a long
detention might follow, and never inclined to brook the least delay,
decided on an immediate start. Extra scouts were stationed on the
rocks. The steersmen, both old men, with keen grave faces and
flowing white beards, took their places in the boats. The rowers,
twelve to each boat, stood to their short sweeps, each with a foot on
the bench before him, the passengers crouching quietly at the
bottom of the boats. The chief of the scouts from his post, on a
pinnacle of rock which commanded the perilous and tortuous
passage through the bar, raised his arms to Heaven and prayed
aloud for Divine aid and blessing, the crowd and rowers listening in
devout silence and at the close of the invocation joining heartily in
the final “Amín.” Then at a signal we started. Each immense breaker
threatened to swamp us, yet we rose and fell safely on the great
waves while struggling nearer to the narrow dangerous passage
through the rocks, yet holding back and waiting for the signal to
pass, while from the shore rose the cries of the crowd appealing to
God and “Sidna Aisa” (Our Lord Jesu) to help and protect us. At last
the signal was given, and, like a flash, the first boat passed through
and was safe in the open before another great breaker thundered in.
The second boat followed a few minutes later, and when clear of the
bar the rowers of each boat, raising their hands to Heaven in a
solemn “fatha,” thanked God and Sidna Aisa for help in the hour of
need.
‘As the sea was so high it was judged useless to attempt to cross
the bar at Rabát, and the Lively returned direct to Tangier.’
 CHAPTER XX.

ASCENT OF THE ATLAS MOUNTAINS.

After his return from the Mission to Marákesh, which has been
described in the previous chapter, Sir John, writing to Sir Henry
Layard on May 24, 1873, gives an epitome of his labours at the
Court, and refers to the expeditions undertaken to the Atlas
Mountains during his travels.

‘We returned,’ he says, ‘from our travels on the 8th inst. in better health than
when we started. The weather was cool, and no rain fell to stop our march except
on one day.
‘I had no instructions from the Foreign Office except to deliver my new
credentials; but I took advantage, of course, of my visit to the Court to place our
relations on a better footing, and I flatter myself I have succeeded, as I have
settled, or put in the proper groove for settlement, a host of pending claims and
grievances.
‘Tissot was at the Court at the same time as myself, and we marched hand in
hand in all questions affecting common interests, or, as Tissot described the
position of the Moorish Government, like that of a wild boar with a hound hanging
on each ear. The Moors were astonished to find the French and British
Representatives in perfect union and showing no signs of petty jealousy about
etiquette in forms; in fact, we took our precautions of warning Moorish and our own
officials that we insisted upon no attention being shown or form observed to one or
the other which differed.
‘The Sultan and his Ministers were most courteous and hospitable. Nothing
could be more pleasing than His Majesty’s manner and language to myself in a
private audience. He conversed with great good sense, but he declared his policy
to be conservative in the strictest sense of the word.
‘In reply to the proposals made by Tissot and myself for various reforms and
improvements, His Majesty said to me, “We and thou understand very well that all
you suggest is very excellent, and might be most beneficial in developing the
resources of our dominions; but the eminent men (Ulama, &c.) do not desire that
we should introduce the innovations of Europe into this land, nor conform
ourselves with Christian usages. We made certain promises on our accession to
the throne, and unless my councillors alter their views, we cannot, without
endangering our position.” When I alluded to Turkey and Egypt, he intimated that
those Governments had no doubt increased in power and wealth, but that their
independence was shaken.
‘Tissot received a telegram from his Government regarding some frontier
conflict near Taza, stating that a large force had been sent by the Governor of
Algeria to enter Morocco and chastise the predatory tribes. Thiers stopped the
march of the force, until Tissot could be referred to. He has arranged all matters
satisfactorily with the Sultan, to whom he brought the “Grand Cordon of the Legion
of Honour.” . . .
‘Whilst the Sultan was digesting my memoranda on various affairs, we made an
expedition to the slopes of the Atlas. My son reached the snow, but was obliged to
beat a rapid retreat, as the mountaineers were in revolt against the Sultan. The
Shloh tribes of the Atlas, who were submissive to the Sultan, were most kind and
hospitable to us. They gave us all a hearty welcome, and I was delighted on
finding that I was known to all these wild fellows as being a friend to the Moors and
“a just man.” The valleys of the Atlas are very beautiful and fertile. The inhabitants
live in two-storied houses, something like the Swiss, only very rude in form. They
are a far superior race to their conquerors, the Arabs.’

As this letter shows, the hope which Sir John had entertained of
returning with the Mission through the Atlas mountains and thence to
Mogador was not completely fulfilled, as a rising of the tribes in that
district rendered the expedition unsafe. Sid Musa however
suggested that before leaving Marákesh, an expedition of a few days
might be organised to visit ‘Uríka,’ on the slope of the Atlas nearest
to the city. This was arranged, and on the morning of April 17 the
party left Marákesh by the beautiful Bab el Mahsen, or Government
gate, the fine old arch of which, built of red stone engraved with
Arabic inscriptions, is said to have been brought by the Moors from
Spain,—an improbable legend founded on the fact that Jeber was
the architect. The narrative is given from Miss Hay’s Diary.
‘As we passed the Sultan’s palace, which, by the way, is said to
contain a female population amounting to a thousand women (of all
colours!), the standard-bearer lowered the banner as a mark of
respect. This salute was also accorded when passing the tombs of
“saléhin,” or holy men.
‘On this trip, as also on the subsequent return journey to Mogador,
the usual red banner that precedes an envoy was replaced by a
green one. This latter is the emblem of the Sultan’s spiritual
authority, and there was a peculiar significance and compliment in its
being sent to precede the Representative of Great Britain and of a
Christian Sovereign. The Sultan also sent his own stirrup-holder, a
fine old Bokhári, to attend Sir John, as he would his Royal Master, an
office which the noble old man punctiliously fulfilled. He was always
near Sir John’s person, prepared to alight and hold his stirrup when
required, as he was wont to do for the Sultan. The old man had
many a quaint tale to relate, and Sir John would sometimes summon
him to his side and encourage him to talk of his recollections and
experiences.
‘The valley of the Atlas, whither we were bound, was in sight due
South. Our way at first lay across the plain and along the line of deep
and dangerous pits that mark the track of the aqueduct which
supplies Marákesh with water, said to come from the hills thirty miles
distant. These pits are about twenty feet in diameter and of equal
depth, and one of our party had a narrow escape one day, during a
wild and general race across the plain, riding nearly directly into one
of these chasms concealed by long grass. Fortunately the clever
little Barb swerved, and, jumping, cleared the pit to one side.
‘Tradition states that formerly, in remote times, an aqueduct
brought water underground direct from the Atlas to the city. This
became blocked and damaged, but could not be repaired or cleared
owing to its great depth below the surface. Therefore one of the
ancient rulers, to collect the water it supplied, made great wells or
reservoirs some fifteen miles from Marákesh, and closed all the
fountains and springs in their vicinity. From these the present water
supply was brought to the city, and originally flowed in through four
hundred canals or aqueducts. These, Arabian historians relate, were
the work of 20,000 Christian captives.