The Patient as Text: Literary Scholarship and Medical Practice in Margaret Edson's Wit

Abstract

Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Wit [1], engages audiences in Dr. Vivian Bearing's experience and transition from prominent professor of seventeenth-century poetry to victim of terminal metastatic ovarian cancer, prize patient in experimental chemotherapeutic treatment, and, finally, to her death. By combining her knowledge of the procedures and personnel of the modern research hospital with the techniques of metaphysical poetry, Edson reveals, with candor and humor, unexpected parallels between the literary scholar and the medical professionals who treat her. Wit shows that, despite surface disparities, both disciplines use language to inhibit rather than promote communication, both avoid meaningful personal interaction, and both reduce the subject of research to object. Thus Wit challenges teachers of literature and medical professionals alike to assess their efficacy in conveying to students and patients the "simple human truths" that dignify life and death. Dr. Vivian Bearing, a distinguished professor of seventeenth-century English poetry, specifically John Donne's "Holy Sonnets," learns from Dr. Harvey Kelekian, an equally distinguished oncologist, that she is suffering from stage-4 metastatic ovarian cancer. Edson draws on her own experience as an aide on an oncology/HIV-AIDS ward to lead her audience through Vivian's [2] downward spiral from diagnosis, through an experimental treatment for primary-site ovarian cancer-a protocol overseen by Dr. Jason Posner, Kelekian's oncology fellow and Vivian's former student-and, finally, to death. The unlikely combination of the realities of life and death in a modern research hospital and the paraphernalia of metaphysical poetry-religious and philosophic subject matter, paradox, witty wordplay, and far-fetched metaphors-reveals similarities between them, and the play becomes, as a result, a compelling and instructive experience for teachers of literature and medical professionals alike.