Gordon M
Barnard College, New York, New York, USA.
Acad Med. 1999 Oct;74(10):1097-100. doi: 10.1097/00001888-199910000-00012.
This essay considers the consequences of childhood experiences with family illness on future adult sensibilities. Novelist and memoirist Mary Gordon describes her father's early death from heart disease and her childhood responsibilities toward her mother who was chronically ill with polio. She examines the relations between the ill body and the rituals and teachings of Catholicism and, by implication, all religious imagings of the body. By detailing her current caregiving responsibilities toward her mother, who is now homebound with Alzheimer disease, she scrutinizes the responses of the healthy toward the ill. She cites passages from her own novels--The Other Side, The Shadow Man, and Spending--in which characters' bodies fail and sicken. By examining these retrospective and prospective experiences with other people's ailments, Gordon exhorts medical students and doctors to tend to the bodies in their care with skill, with vision, and with words. She joins fellow writer Joseph Conrad in his task: "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel; it is, before all, to make you see."
本文探讨童年时期与家人患病经历对未来成人情感的影响。小说家兼回忆录作者玛丽·戈登描述了她父亲因心脏病早逝，以及她在童年时期对身患小儿麻痹症慢性病的母亲所承担的责任。她审视了患病身体与天主教仪式及教义之间的关系，以及所有宗教对身体的想象。通过详述她目前对患有老年痴呆症、足不出户的母亲的照料责任，她审视了健康人对病人的反应。她引用了自己小说《另一面》《影子人》和《消费》中的段落，其中人物的身体出现衰弱和疾病。通过审视这些对他人疾病的回顾性和前瞻性经历，戈登告诫医学生和医生，要用技巧、洞察力和语言去照料他们所护理的身体。她与作家约瑟夫·康拉德一道完成这项任务：“凭借文字的力量让你听见，让你感受；首要的是，让你看见。”
