NARRATIVE REPRESENTATION OF THE PHYSICIAN’S IMAGE IN THE 19TH CENTURY U.S. LITERATURE
NARRATIVE REPRESENTATION OF THE PHYSICIAN’S IMAGE IN THE 19TH CENTURY U.S. LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: The public attitudes towards this profession in the U.S. are highly unfavorable: there is an overt distrust to their practices, since medicine has not yet consolidated as a reliable science. Consequently, in the 19th century, the images of the physicians deliberately lacked any professional qualities. In fact, the 19th century literature of the U.S. tended to represent the incompetent medical practitioners. In the analyzed narratives, physician’s profession is constantly discredited: doctors are generally ignorant and incompetent, engaged in pseudo-medical practices, cynical and unable to save their patients. The physician’s personal features are developed only occasionally: they are the eccentric possessors of “secret knowledge”. At the same time, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) by Edward Bellamy is the first literary effort to describe a physician of the future as an omniscient adviser and an all-round developed person of person of vast reading and encyclopedic knowledge.

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