John Lantos began the day with his paper "Why Doctors Make Good Protaganists." It was a broad survey of writers from the 19th century up to Percy who have used physicians as central figures in their literature: Bovary, Mann, Sinclair Lewis, Camus, etc. Lantos argued that this literature offers an emotional benchmark by focusing on the value of the ordinary doctor, and of human relationships that cannot be quantified.
Jay Tolson's presentation, titled "Walker Percy: Reluctant Physician" extended some of the ideas in Tolson's excellent biography of Percy. Tolson claimed that Percy always saw himself as a physician, though he was as happy as not when he discontined practicing medicine. Tolson detailed his meeting with Percy just a few month's before Percy's death. Percy's relationship to his own cancer was as much as the scientist, fascinated with the mechanism of the disease, as it was of an individual, attracted and yet repulsed by one's own death. Tolson argued that, as physician and writer, Percy brought the approach of science to the problem of estrangment of man as an individual. As the physician is concerned with healing the body, the writer follows a similar path, moving from comedy, to pointing beyond to the possibility of spiritual healing.
Carl Elliot's presentation "Prozac and the Existential Novel" was a very provocative account of two kinds of therapy. Elliot is trained both as a physician and a philosopher, and his area includes philosophy of psychiatry. His presentation was a kind of conversation with Peter Kramer's book "Listening to Prozac." I have since read Kramer's book, and I would join with Elliot in highly recommending it. In the last chapter, Kramer explicitly mentions Percy's THE THANATOS SYNDROME, and then argues in favor of Prozac, both as a therapy and as revealing something about what it is to be a human being. Elliot was very nervous about Kramer's praise for Prozac, and advocated the existential novel as, perhaps, a better alternative. There is much here that could be thought about more, for it is a rich topic.
M. Montello's presentation "Teaching Percy to Medical Students" was a wonderful description of her own success teaching Percy's novels. Professor Montello teaches "Narrative Ethics" at Harvard Medical School. She argued that physicians need to develop not only the skills of the scientist, or even the philosopher's regard for ethics in terms of principles, but also a narrative competence. This alternative mode of knowing in terms of narrative is necessary for understanding persons as persons, and is a prerequisite for the physician's task of writing case studies and understanding patients as individuals, as people with personal histories. To develop this skill in medical students, she described her successes teaching literature and in particular Percy at Harvard Medical School. She showed how THE MOVIEGOER can be read as a case history. The physician's questions to Binx are left out, but we can fill them in: What problem brings you here? What is your trouble? When did this happen in the past? With this focus on narrative rather than propositions and principles, the medical student learns an "alternative epistemology," a blending of ear with eye, a listening to the patient's story as well as a seeing the patient as object. This presentation was, for me, one of the highlights of a very fine conference.
There were also several presentations by physicians who, like Percy, have made a mark as writers. We heard from three physician writers: a poet, a novelist and a short story writer, each reading selections from their own work and comparing their work to Percy's. The day ended with a presentation of the film "Time Indefinite." This is a quirky, delightful documentary that captures something of the existential sense of Percy's writing. Though Percy is never mentioned in the film, the parallels were clear in the themes of birth and death, love and marriage, life and the search for its meaning.
On the following two days, the conference continued with the ordinary fare of topics in Clinical Medical Ethics: Health Care Policy Questions, Physician Assisted Suicide, Patient Autonomy, etc. It was not clear whether or to what extent the discussion of Percy on the first day of the conference would impact the discussions on the next two days. I was unable to stay, so I don't know. Based on some of the paper titles, I think that it is a fair guess that Percy would have been both delighted and horrified that his ideas were discussed by physicians who can, on the next day, discuss like Buddy Brown in LOVE IN THE RUINS the benefits of the new legislation in Oregon that steps a bit closer to the world described in Percy's Tom More novels.
Gregory R. Beabout
Department of Philosophy
Saint Louis University