Medical fiction

The medical lessons of science fiction.

Literature and Medicine 20, no. 1 (Spring 2001) 13–25 © 2001 by Eric S. Rabkin *The Genre Evolution Project (GEP) web site (http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo) includes a Team Roster that lists the names of all faculty and students involved in this work from its inception. I particularly want to thank my friend and collaborator Carl P. Simon, Professor of Mathematics, Economics, Public Policy, and ...

Medical humanities and medical alterity in fiction and in life.

A widely accepted component of any answer to the question 'What is it to do good medical ethics?' is the commitment to benefit people's health, in principlist terminology, 'beneficence'. This paper addresses deliberate maleficence and the cultural otherness with which it is associated, focusing on the activities of the serial killer Dr Harold Shipman. It finds an uncanny 'fit' between the norma...

BOOK REVIEW Medical Qigong: Fact or Fiction?

Replacing the patient: the fiction of prosthetics in medical practice.

The invention of computer simulations used for practicing surgical maneuvers in a video game-like format has an ancestry in the artificial limbs of history and is reflected, grotesquely, in Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Man That Was Used Up" (1850). The nineteenth century worked to ensure that the incomplete body did indeed retain a sense of self by creating prostheses to mimic corporeal ...

Passionate Virtue: Conceptions of Medical Professionalism in Popular Romance Fiction.

Medical romance fiction is a subgenre of popular romance fiction that features medical professionals in their work environment. This essay explores the way professionalism is portrayed in popular medical romance fiction written during the early twenty-first century, a period of significant disruption in both the public image and self-understanding of organized medicine. I analyze a selection of...