...the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good...

                                                                        Middlemarch; George Eliot; 1871-2

This page contains the on-line readings in literature and medicine I created for Australian National University Medical School on a voluntary basis from 2004 to 2006.  Please feel free to use this content, but please acknowledge its source if you do so.  

Medical Autobiography

Frank McCann: Medicine Man

Leslie Poidevin: The Lucky Doctor

Clyde Fenton: Flying Doctor

Lindsay Rogers: Guerrilla Surgeon

Leon Berk: Destined to Live

Miss Pink and the Warlpiri Dreaming

Poetry and Medicine 

The Greek Gods of Medicine.

Readings in Amerindian medicine

John Keats

Dannie Abse

Andre Breton, Gertrude Stein, W.A. Osborne

Omar Khayyam

William Carlos Williams

Grace Perry

Spike Milligan and Francis Webb

Shen

Jack Hibberd

Glenn Colquhoun

Philip Hodgins and Michael Dransfield

Jennifer Harrison and Craig Powell

Australia and its convicts

The doctor and war: McCrae; Millett; Potter; Mengele

Ovid and Clement Marot

John West and Saxby Pridmore

Miroslav Holub 

Len Green

Zarathustra

Literature and Medicine  

Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel; and Bertholt Brecht: Life of Galileo

Anton Chekhov: Ivanov

Shakespeare

HG Wells: The Island of Dr Moreau

FJ Thwaites: The Mad Doctor

Robin Cook: developing literary diabetes

Han Suyin: A Many Splendoured Thing

Ben Jonson: poems and The Alchemist; Christopher Marlowe: Dr Faustus

Somerset Maugham: Sheppey

J Bowman: Dr Angel

A J Cronin: The Citadel

G Bernard Shaw: The Doctor's Dilemma

George Eliot: Middlemarch

Richard Gordon: Doctor in the House