代笔人和试管婴儿:一个医学突破的故事。

IF 1.1 2区 哲学 Q4 HEALTH CARE SCIENCES & SERVICES
Nick Hopwood
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引用次数: 0

摘要

代写自传已经获得了如此高的知名度,以至于小说和电影都以鬼魂为主题。为了加深对这种科学和医学合作的理解,本文重建了《生命的问题》(1980)的制作过程,“世界上第一个试管婴儿的轰动故事”。尽管受到女权主义学者的批评,通过研究进行修订,并在小说中加以修饰,这本由罗伯特·爱德华兹和帕特里克·斯特普托撰写的自传仍然是英国团队实现体外受精(IVF)工作的标准历史。因此,现在是时候调查他对医生和诗人丹尼·阿伯斯的“无价帮助”所表示的谢意了。我使用以前未开发的手稿来阐明作者,重写者和编辑之间的关系,以及他们参与研究的人之间的关系。记录显示,Abse为一家出版商改写了一些平淡无奇的草稿,这家出版商曾买卖过医生们关于“世纪婴儿”的故事,需要一本畅销书。为了吸引读者,他重新修改了文本,使减轻不孕症成为一项长达职业生涯的探索。由于增加了生动的人物场景和说明性的对话,Abse开始让女性——妻子、助手和病人——在剧中扮演更重要的角色。爱德华兹和他的圈子对各种文学参考和事实主张的反对被驳回了。然而,与他们自己的草案相比,作者们得到了更多的同情,试管婴儿也得到了更有效的推广。这一过程对最近的故事重述进行了审视,并举例说明了合作如何塑造科学和医学自传。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
The ghostwriter and the test-tube baby: a medical breakthrough story.

Ghostwriting autobiographies has gained so high a profile that novels and films focus on the ghost. To deepen understanding of such collaborations in science and medicine, this article reconstructs the making of A Matter of Life (1980), 'the sensational story of the world's first test-tube baby'. Although critiqued by feminist scholars, revised through research and embellished in fiction, this double autobiography of Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe is still the standard history of the British team's work to achieve in vitro fertilisation (IVF). It is thus high time to investigate the debt acknowledged only by 'gratitude for his invaluable help' to the physician and poet Dannie Abse. I use previously unexploited manuscripts to illuminate relationships among authors, rewriter, and editor, and among those they cast as involved in the research. The records show that Abse rewrote underwhelming drafts for a publisher that had bought and sold the doctors' story of the 'baby of the century' and needed a bestseller. To engage readers, he reworked the text so that alleviating infertility appeared as a career-long quest. As a result of adding vivid scenes with characters and expository dialogue, Abse began to give women-wives, assistants and patients-larger roles in the drama. The objections of Edwards and his circle to various literary references and factual claims were overruled. Yet the authors came across more sympathetically, and IVF was promoted more effectively, than in their own drafts. The process puts recent retellings of the story into perspective and exemplifies how collaboration can shape scientific and medical autobiographies.

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来源期刊
Medical History
Medical History 医学-科学史与科学哲学
CiteScore
1.60
自引率
0.00%
发文量
25
审稿时长
>12 weeks
期刊介绍: Medical History is a refereed journal devoted to all aspects of the history of medicine and health, with the goal of broadening and deepening the understanding of the field, in the widest sense, by historical studies of the highest quality. It is also the journal of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health. The membership of the Editorial Board, which includes senior members of the EAHMH, reflects the commitment to the finest international standards in refereeing of submitted papers and the reviewing of books. The journal publishes in English, but welcomes submissions from scholars for whom English is not a first language; language and copy-editing assistance will be provided wherever possible.
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