Review of Jessica Roberts’s “Teaching Literature and History of Medicine in the National Health Service.”

摘要

If Kathryn Strong Hansen’s method of “literature for specific purposes”(Configurations 26.3, Summer 2018) moves literature into science and engineeringfields, then Jessica Roberts pushes literature out of its comfort zone farther still.Expanding beyond the university setting entirely, Roberts demonstrates the impact ofliterary engagement in the workplace, focusing on the professional context of theUnited Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS). Roberts generously frames herarticle as a response to my Summer 2017 essay in JLS, “Teaching Literature andScience in Silicon Valley”, and I am excited to have the opportunity to continue thedialogue here. Engaging with Roberts prompts me to reread my own work with a newoutlook. Most importantly, Roberts’s positive experience as the employee of anorganization that “does expect and desire that [she] exercise [her] subject specialistknowledge” (345) – a doctorate in “nineteenth-century medicine and the periodicalpress” (346) – offers a useful corrective to my original pessimistic tendency to assumethat humanistic values would too often be corrupted by their applications in industry.