Last night I attended the prize ceremony for the inaugural Wellcome Trust book prize, awarded to "outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health, illness or medicine". I was attracted by its slightly barmy mixing of literary disciplines. And I was impressed by the calibre of the judges, among whom were Jo Brand (chair, and 10 years a psychiatric nurse) and Raymond Tallis, one of the few people whose writing clarifies, rather than further muddles, my understanding of neuroscience.
The shortlist, which can be viewed in full here, comprised two novels and four non-fiction books ranging between autobiography, investigative journalism and biographical essays. The winning book, Keeper, Andrea Gillies' memoir of caring for a relative with Alzheimer's, hasn't received a single review since its publication in May – something this award will, one hopes, remedy.
Speaking with Brand and Tallis before the ceremony, I wondered which books they thought best demonstrated the qualities they were looking for. Interestingly enough, they both chose novels. Brand described Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as being about "a very specific time in American history, when psychiatry was very unsophisticated and nurses were really no more than prison warders". Tallis opted for Mann's The Magic Mountain, which "brilliantly fictionalises medicine, the thrill of science, and the mystery of the human body."
The prize's website plays a similar game, suggesting García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Ian McEwan's Saturday as likely nominees from the past. But the possibility exists, of course, to reach back much further in the literary record than this. Illness, certainly, was present at the birth of western literature: just think of Apollo, angered by Agamemnon's insulting of the priest Chryses, sending a plague to ravage the Greek army in the Iliad. Medicine is present, too, albeit in primitive form: the many wounds Homer describes are anatomically accurate, while Machaon's herbal remedies and palliative care are doctoring of a sort.
Four hundred years later Thucydides describes an Athenian plague in graphic detail in The Peloponnesian War. In myth, scholars believe an historical plague was the impetus for Hercules's battle with the Lernean Hydra, the creature's multiplying heads representing its rapacious spread. The writings of the most famous Greek physician of all, Hippocrates, were the first to separate medicine from religion, and disease from supernatural causation. He lends his name to a text – his authorship of it is uncertain – which defines the ethical responsibilities of doctors to this day, give or take a reference to Apollo or two.
Herophilos and Erasistratos wrote influentially of the pulse and anatomy, respectively, but most of what we know of their work comes from later commentaries by the Romans Galen and Celsus. Many of these works, it should be said, are important for the learning they contain rather than the reading experience they offer. There are exceptions, though. Vesalius's On the Workings of the Human Body, published in 1543, not only revolutionised medicine by introducing the concept of body as machine, but also exhibits a prose style that consciously emulates Cicero.
One hundred years after Vesalius, Oxford don Robert Burton was exploring the role upbringing and culture play in mental illness in his Anatomy of Melancholy. Sir William Osler called this "the greatest medical treatise written by a layman". Beyond that it can claim to be one of the most erudite and fascinating books ever written.
Treatises and textbooks are all very well, but what of other fields? Fiction is riddled with doctors, from Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith to HP Lovecraft's Herbert West; Burroughs's terrifying Benway and Proust's buffoonish Cottard. Voltaire used a doctor, Pangloss, to lampoon Leibniz's theory of the "best of all possible worlds", while HG Wells' Dr Moreau stands as a warning against untrammelled medical research. Kafka's most enigmatic short story is named for a country doctor.
As for illness, plague provided the basis for Daniel Defoe's early work of faction, A Journal of the Plague Year, while Camus used it to signify fascism's spread in La Peste. Syphilis is another favourite, cropping up in Measure for Measure and Othello, Candide (Pangloss cheerily loses an eye and ear to it), A Tale of Two Cities and Mann's Doctor Faustus. Perhaps its most resonant appearances, though, are in Ibsen's Ghosts and A Doll's House, where it powerfully underlines the hypocrisy of late 19th-Century moral codes.
Finally, of course, there are the writers who were themselves doctors: William Carlos Williams, Rabelais, Chekhov, Bulgakov, the late Michael Crichton, Somerset Maugham, Schiller and Karl Georg Büchner, author of Woyzeck. In the case of all these, their profession had some bearing on their art.
Even these examples, though, are mere nicks in a huge body of work. I need help in order to cut deeper into the subject – I haven't even mentioned nurses, for starters. What are your favourite works of literature that place health, illness or medicine at their heart? I can't match the Wellcome Trust's £25,000 prize, I'm afraid; just genuine interest and a pleasant bedside manner.
