Between Doctors and Patients: The Changing Balance of Power

In Between Doctors and Patients, Lillian R. Furst brings together the seemingly incompatible worlds of medicine and literature to illustrate the changing balance of power between doctors and patients since the evolution of modern medicine. Linking popular novels with recent works of medical history, she offers an astute portrait of medicine's emergence from a semi-quack profession to one of the most revered in contemporary society. Furst shows how vividly such novels as Eliot's Middlemarch, Lewis's Arrowsmith, and the stories of Conan Doyle reveal the changing role of doctors from once-modest supplicants to powerul healers.