Editing and Interdisciplinarity: Literature, Medicine, and Narrative Medicine

Some instances of editorship seem to call for activism as well as archival scholarship. When as coeditors (Maura Spiegel from the English department and Rita Charon from the Department of Medicine at Columbia) we took up stewardship of the boundary-crossing journal Literature and Medicine, the divisions between its two parent fields were more evident than their alignments. Our readers, despite their express willingness to cross the lines between humanities and science, were not always at home with the complex theoretical musings of each other, a state of affairs that had limited the intellectual octane of earlier stages of this new dual field. Nonetheless, we took a chance on our readers’ intellectual curiosity and published sophisticated theoretical treatments of clinically salient topics (e.g., disability, mourning, memory) and clinical treatments of textually salient topics (e.g., psychoanalytic theories of reading and neurological sources of identity). Sensing that in some literary quarters an interface with medicine carried the musty aura of “cultural enrichment” for busy doctors or was merely the work of medical hobbyists intent on diagnosing the unspecified ailments of characters in novels, we sought and published established literary scholars—including Wayne Booth, Andrew Delbanco,