Literature and Medicine by Ronald Schleifer & Jerry B. Vannatta

Author:Ronald Schleifer & Jerry B. Vannatta
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030191283
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Character, Ethics, and Mystery

In Chekhov’s writing—we’ve seen it already in Chap. 4—his characters confront particular crises in life, which is precisely where a career in healthcare frequently positions those who, as Anatole Broyard notes, routinely face “the crisis of [their patient’s] life” (1992: online). The power of Chekhov’s story here is that it is “twice told”: two characters, physician and aristocrat, face the terrible loss of child and spouse so that Chekhov is able to describe the workings of the absence of virtues—including what we take to be an overriding virtue of “decency”—that are encountered, but not fully understood, in the vignette in this chapter.

In The Chief Concern of Medicine , we note six virtues that are particularly useful in healthcare practices. They are Decency, Discernment, Conscientiousness, Trustworthiness, Compassion, and Competence (see The Chief Concern: 294–295). (It is instructive to note their relation to the Professional Milestones set forth in Appendix 5 since the latter were developed in order to recognize and instill professional healthcare comportment while the former grew out of engagements with literature.) In The Chief Concern we even offer an acronym to help people remember these enumerated virtues: “Doctor Dogood Comforts The Crying Child.” One possible exercise in reading “Enemies” might be to consider the degree to which Dr. Kirilov exhibits these virtues, even in the face of his devastating loss, much as the Professional Workshop considers the degree to which Dr. Franciscus in Richard Selzer’s story exhibits professional milestones. Do the “undeserved insults” Kirilov and Abogin fling at one another—“unjust, cruel, and absurd”—help us discern “virtuous” human interaction? Would virtues, then, be “just, kind, sensible”? Is “the egoism of the unhappy” a form of arrogance? What is the relationship of arrogance to virtue?

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