The Last Physician: Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine

181 Pages·1999·11.13 MB·English

by  Carl Elliott

The Last Physician

THE LAST PHYSICIAN
Walker Percy and the Moral Life ofM edicine
Edited by Carl Elliott and John Lantos
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 1999
© 1999 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper (§
Typeset in Stone Serif by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
Who of us is not so strangely alone that it is
the cool clinical touch of a stranger that serves
best to treat his aloneness?
- Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
Contents
ix Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Carl Elliott
9 Dr. Percy's Hold on Medicine
Robert Coles
16 The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes
Ross McElwee
38 Why Doctors Make Good Protagonists
John Lantos
46 From Eye to Ear in Percy's Fiction:
Changing the Paradigm for Clinical Medicine
Martha Montello
59 Prozac and the Existential Novel: Two Therapies
Carl Elliott
70 Ethics in the Ruins
David Schiedermayer
81 Walker Percy and Medicine:
The Struggle for Recovery in Medical Education
Richard Martinez
Contents vii
96 Now You Are One of Us:
Gender, Reversal, and the Good Read
Laurie Zoloth
112 Inherited Depression, Medicine, and Illness
in Walker Percy's Art
Bertram Wyatt-Brown
134 Pathology Rounds with Dr. Percy:
The Modern Malaise, Its Causes and Cure
Brock Eide
150 Walker Percy, Reluctant Physician
Jay Tolson
160 Afterword: Writing and Rewriting Stories
John Lantos
163 Contributors
165 Index

Acknowledgments
Several of the papers in this collection were first presented at a conference
on Walker Percy at the University of Chicago's MacLean Center for Clinical
Medical Ethics in 1995. We would like to thank Mrs. D. J. MacLean for her
generous support of that conference, and Mark Siegler for his help in orga
nizing it. We are grateful to Miriam Angress and Reynolds Smith at Duke
University Press for their editorial help. Rachel Toor deserves special thanks
for going beyond the call of duty in helping us bring the book to completion.
John Lantos would like to thank Anne Dudley Goldblatt for many hours of
discussion on literature and medicine. Carl Elliott would like to thank Robert
Crouch for his excellent research assistance. This research was supported by
grants from Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l'Aide a la Recherche
and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.