『주홍글자』의 칠링워스에서 『각성』의 만델렛까지: 19세기 중·후반 미국의 의학사와 의사들의 문학적 재현

Abstract

The technological progress in mid-late nineteenth century America had endowed doctors with the emblematic sigdcance to keep the moral integrity of community, as well as the mental and p'hysical sanity of individuals. This paper aims at scrutinizing how the changing social status of doctors and the rapid progress of medical science have represented in the exemplary literary texts of mid-late nineteenth century America. As the medical education had established in late nineteenth century, the real doctors who had been blamed for "empiric" have acquired the standardized medical skills and stable social standing. Nevertheless, the texts from The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Country of the Pointed Fir, and The Awakening revealed the developmental phases of the heightening influence of doctors and medical science; the literary crystallization on doctors and medical science has covered from the yearning for creating a new social order to the hostile criticism for limitation of medicinal power. The doctors and medical science came to be the subject matter of literary interpretation, for the writers endeavored to gauge the unpredictable aftermath of ever burgeoning medical knowledge which had seeped through all the corners of our lives.