The essays collected in this volume – over half by physicians and several of which were initially presented at a conference at the University of Chicago’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics in 1995 – offer a unique blend of Walker Percy matters. For the general reader, or the reader unfamiliar with Walker Percy’s authorship, there is important background discussion of Walker Percy matters (noun): his southern heritage, his preoccupation with his family’s history of depression, including the suicides of his father and grandfather and his mother’s unexplained death, his life-threatening struggle with tuberculosis, and glimpses of his work as an essayist and novelist.

However, the real theme of this book is that Walker Percy matters (verb) to each of the essayists. For example, he matters as friend (Robert Coles), mentor (Ross McElwee), benchmark (John Lantos), "literary-clinician" (Martha Montello), as someone "fairly well-rested" (David Schiedermayer), "guide" for the moral and spiritual life (Richard Martinez), "one of us" (Laurie Zoloth), someone who articulates "the unspeakable" (Bertram Wyatt-Brown), "psychopathologist’ (Brock Eide), "reluctant physician" (Jay Tolson), and as someone "who gives voice to your own unarticulated, half-formed ideas" (Carl Elliott).

The contributors to this volume are all familiar with both Percy’s writings and the practice of medicine. Several of the essayists experience, as did Percy, the tension between medicine and storytelling. And this becomes the focus of the essays. As each contributor looks at "the complex architecture of [Percy’s] creativity" (Wyatt-Brown), each explores what it is in Percy’s writing that is related to what physicians do. The result is an engaged scholarship that brings into sharp relief "Walker Percy, physician-patient-author".

Why does Walker Percy matter? Many doctors have become writers – Keats, Chekhov, Maugham, Conan Doyle, William Carlos Williams, Richard Selzer, Michael Crichton – so Percy’s escape to storytelling is not particularly unusual: "I was the happiest man ever to contact tuberculosis, because it enabled me to get out of Bellvue and quit medicine" (Percy). And Percy, himself, didn’t count on his fellow physicians to support his writing habit: "doctors don’t read a damn thing." However, what seems to matter to many of the essayists is that Percy not only continued to list himself in the American Medical Dictionary, but that his experiences as a physician – and, perhaps more importantly, as a patient – remained impressed in his work. They make a strong argument that "Doctor Percy" as "physician-novelist" continued to take the "vital signs" of his reader and of his culture.

The writers in this book offer Percy the ultimate compliment – they present him as a healer. In describing Percy’s transformative journey from physician to patient to author, this collection of essays may well be documenting "the last of the old-style physicians…[t]he ‘physician of the soul’" (Elliot).

Larry Hultgren describes himself as follows:

A.B. Grinnell College majoring in Philosophy and Religion; Ph.D. Vanderbilt University in Philosophy. Currently Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Wesleyan College, Norfolk, VA. Since I am at a liberal arts college, my teaching runs the gamut of philosophy offerings. I am especially interested in interdisciplinary pursuits, and I direct the college’s Social Ecology Program and our innovative PORTfolio Project which attempts to bring the liberal arts to life for our students by connecting the classroom with real world experiences. I also serve on the Bioethics Committee of the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk, VA, and serve on the Board of Directors of the Bioethics Network of Southeast Virginia.

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Categories: Philosophical, General, Fiction

Keywords: literature, interpretation, criticism