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on Hands, which used to be important diagnostic extensions for doctors. ‘The War of Eye and Ear’ was catalogued under Visions until I realised that the real concern of the essay—in spite of what Louis-Ferdinand Céline said in a 1957 interview about our species being terribly dull-witted, thick or just a drag (‘extraordinaire de lourdeur’)—is the increasing weightlessness of our experience, as if we were mere bundled spoors of hygiene and charisma; this made room for the Vertigo of ‘Stendhal’s syndrome’, which could be anything from the mildest vasovagal episode to major psychotic decompensation. My title ‘A Doctor’s Dictionary’ is a reminder, at least to myself, that more of my professional life than I might have wanted has been spent in the precincts of weighty books, not least in France, where the unexpected difficulties of making a living as an ‘omnipraticien’ (general practitioner) in Strasbourg led to my becoming a scientific translator and editor. Many of these books have been dictionaries, lexicons and encyclopaedias, although with digitalisation much of their bulk and mustiness has volatilised. To be fascinated by the ‘extractive industries’, like the early Romantics—heightened for me by a year in a gritty but fascinating Australian mining town— is perhaps a kind of nostalgia for bodily experience, and all its effort and fatigue, now that digitisation, seemingly in league with capital, has embarked on the process of hollowing out ‘all that is solid’ even more drastically and purposefully than in Marx’s time: there are very few jobs and professions that have not yielded to the computerisation of what they entail. Losing touch is something that threatens us all. The implications for medicine are serious, when this ancient profession—never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be, but an empirical discipline aided by, and increasingly in thrall to, technology—forgets what it owes to tact. Doctors are translators, interpreters and sign-readers, sure; but sometimes their simple presence counts for something else, as the resident asks Robert Lowell’s persona in his late poem: ‘We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm—how can we help you?’ x  A Doctor’s Dictionary
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Acknowledgements All of these pieces, with one exception, were first published in journals and periodicals, some as commissioned reviews, others as commentary pieces that I cajoled the editors into publishing. Some of them still bear the cauls of their first emergence, but generally I’ve attempted to coat and shoe them as literary essays, able to stand on their own while taking their place in this book’s A–Z schema of things. Some first saw light as occasional pieces in the British Journal of General Practice, and I acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Alec Logan, its deputy editor, who for many years kept asking me to provide a feature on medicine and writing for the Christmas edition of the journal. I am also grateful to the editors of Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Medical Humanities, PN Review, Parnassus, Quadrant, The Linguist, Lapham’s Quarterly, British Medical Journal, The Lancet and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization for allowing me to develop and republish articles from their pages. ‘Crise de Foie’ first appeared in German translation in the weekend feuilleton of the Süddeutsche Zeitung thanks to the efforts of my father-in-law, Christian Schütze, who also translated it. A number of the essays in this book constituted a good part of the manuscript Medicine and the Imagination submitted to the University of Glasgow in 2009 for the degree of Doctor of Letters by publication. I would like to thank Michael Schmidt and John Coyle for alerting me to the existence of a Scottish Universities by-law the terms of which were previously unknown to me, and for their encouragement, and not least that too of my external referees Kenneth Boyd and Peter Davidson, whose appraisals reassured me that I wasn’t entirely on a hiding to nothing. Thanks are also due to my helpful friend Richard Price at the British Library, and to staff at my local institute, Strasbourg’s newly refurbished National and University Library (BNUS)—a magnificent Italianate edifice built in the Wilhelmine period when Strasbourg was Strassburg and second now in France in terms of its collections only to the National Library in Paris—is a precious resource for me as an expatriate writer. Further thanks are also due to colleagues and friends in medicine and the wider world, with whom I have discussed some of the issues raised in this collection Acknowledgements  xi

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on Hands, which used to be important diagnostic extensions for doctors. ‘The War of Eye and Ear’ was catalogued under Visions until I realised that the real concern of the essay—in spite of what Louis-Ferdinand Céline said in a 1957 interview about our species being terribly dull-witted, thick or just a drag (‘extraordinaire de lourdeur’)—is the increasing weightlessness of our experience, as if we were mere bundled spoors of hygiene and charisma; this made room for the Vertigo of ‘Stendhal’s syndrome’, which could be anything from the mildest vasovagal episode to major psychotic decompensation. My title ‘A Doctor’s Dictionary’ is a reminder, at least to myself, that more of my professional life than I might have wanted has been spent in the precincts of weighty books, not least in France, where the unexpected difficulties of making a living as an ‘omnipraticien’ (general practitioner) in Strasbourg led to my becoming a scientific translator and editor. Many of these books have been dictionaries, lexicons and encyclopaedias, although with digitalisation much of their bulk and mustiness has volatilised. To be fascinated by the ‘extractive industries’, like the early Romantics—heightened for me by a year in a gritty but fascinating Australian mining town— is perhaps a kind of nostalgia for bodily experience, and all its effort and fatigue, now that digitisation, seemingly in league with capital, has embarked on the process of hollowing out ‘all that is solid’ even more drastically and purposefully than in Marx’s time: there are very few jobs and professions that have not yielded to the computerisation of what they entail. Losing touch is something that threatens us all. The implications for medicine are serious, when this ancient profession—never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be, but an empirical discipline aided by, and increasingly in thrall to, technology—forgets what it owes to tact. Doctors are translators, interpreters and sign-readers, sure; but sometimes their simple presence counts for something else, as the resident asks Robert Lowell’s persona in his late poem: ‘We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm—how can we help you?’

x  A Doctor’s Dictionary

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