The Literary Companion to Medicine: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry

by Richard Gordon (Editor)

From the author of The Alarming History of Medicine comes the perfect gift and reference book for doctors and medical a unique and entertaining anthology devoted to literature about medicine.
A sampling of the writing in The Literary Companion to Medicine the unforgettable Bob Sawyer of Charles Dickens, Emile Zola's send-up of Lourdes, Thomas Mann's vanished world of Swiss TB sanatoria, Brillat-Savarin's ironic table-talk of nineteenth-century slimmers, James Boswell's disorderly sex life, and the hilarity of the Parisian music hall star Le Petomane.
Diverse and delightful, this survey of prose and poetry vividly reflects the eternal fascination that human beings have with health, sickness, and healing, and with those who cure them. From Rabelais to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Erich Segal, Richard Gordon has amassed an impressive collection that shows how medicine is viewed in literature.

431 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Richard Gordon is the pen name used by Gordon Ostlere (born Gordon Stanley Ostlere on September 15, 1921), an English surgeon and anaesthetist. As Richard Gordon, Ostlere has written several novels, screenplays for film and television and accounts of popular history, mostly dealing with the practice of medicine. He is most famous for a long series of comic novels on a medical theme starting with Doctor in the House, and the subsequent film, television and stage adaptations. His The Alarming History of Medicine was published in 1993, and he followed this with The Alarming History of Sex.

Gordon worked as anaesthetist at St. Bartholomew's Hospital (where he was a medical student) and later as a ship's surgeon and as assistant editor of the British Medical Journal. He has published several technical books under his own name including Anaesthetics for Medical Students(1949); later published as Ostlere and Bryce-Smith's Anaesthetics for Medical Students in 1989, Anaesthetics and the Patient (1949) and Trichlorethylene Anaesthesia (1953). In 1952, he left medical practice and took up writing full time. He has an uncredited role as an anesthesiologist in the movie Doctor in the House.

The early Doctor novels, set in the fictitious St Swithin's, a teaching hospital in London, were initially witty and apparently autobiographical; later books included more sexual innuendo and farce. The novels were very successful in Britain in Penguin paperback during the 1960s and 1970s. Richard Gordon also contributed to Punch magazine and has published books on medicine, gardening, fishing and cricket.

The film adaptation of Doctor in the House was released in 1954, two years after the book, while Doctor at Sea came out the following year with Brigitte Bardot. Dirk Bogarde starred as Dr. Simon Sparrow in both. The later spin-off TV series were often written by other well-known British comic performers.