The Doctor's Role of Witness and Companion: Medical and Literary Ethics of Care in AIDS Physicians' Memoirs

Abstract

Writing about and with care has been a central feature of the literary response to HIV/AIDS. Resistant AIDS narratives are often characterized by the presence of individual and community care ethics, and this care is frequently extended to a literary form of care which bears witness to the lives of people with AIDS. This continuity profoundly marks the physician memoirs of Abraham Verghese (My Own Country), Kate Scannell (Death of the Good Doctor), Daniel Baxter (The Least of These My Brethren), Peter Selwyn (Surviving the Fall), and Abigail Zuger (Strong Shadows). Without creating an idealized or essentialist view of care, these narratives reveal their authors' often-problematic journey from embracing conventional ideas about what constitutes a doctor's role (curing being the primary aim) towards a renewed emphasis on caring. The caring responsibilities of a doctor do not cease with the death of a patient. I argue that these doctors extend their responsibility of caring for patients to their moral responsibility as authors, i.e., "taking care of" the memories of patients (thus combining, in Selwyn's words, the doctor's "role as witness and companion").

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