The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States by Sari Altschuler (review)

By reappraising the historical link between science and the arts, The Medical Imagination seeks to make students of us all and assigns the task of reestablishing the link between disciplines. Because Altschuler is a literary scholar, her appreciation for the imagination goes without saying, and as she shows in The Medical Imagination, the appreciation for the imagination as a medical tool—sometimes exploratory, sometimes diagnostic, sometimes therapeutic—was once an integral part of medical education and the thinking about health and healing in America. [...]her interest in these figures brings character development as a literary method to mind—not only because she deploys it herself in telling this history but because it seems part of the self-fashioning doctors exercise in establishing professional authority and integrating imagination and medicine. [...]of growth in global trade, travel, urban development, war, population changes, scientific discoveries, and professionalization and specialization of medicine, understandings of the sick and healthy body and community were in flux in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because this project itself is a metaimaginative experiment bridging medical science-history with the literary, it does make sense that this organization would be unpredictable.