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Article ID: CBB185593177

“If We Can Make a Cure of Him”: Lyrical Grenfell in the St. Anthony Casebooks, 1906 (2021)

Kidd, Monica (Author)

Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadienne d'Histoire de la Medecine
Volume: 38
Issue: 2
Pages: 423-434

URI: https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/full/10.3138/cbmh.520-032021

DOI: 10.3138/cbmh.520-032021

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Rhetoric in scientific discourse Communication of scientific ideas Science and literature Medical literature Patients Informed consent 20th century, early Labrador (Canada) Newfoundland (Canada) Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir

Narrative-based physician records contain much more than observerless data and diagnoses. Indeed, a “case,” the basic currency of medical communication, can be seen as a literary genre, much like a novel or a poem, and given close readings for author voice, tradition, and influences. In this article, I describe my initial encounter with Dr. Wilfred Grenfell’s casebooks in a hospital basement in St. Anthony, Newfoundland and Labrador, and my subsequent engagement with them as both a physician and a poet. Adopting Bleakley and Marshall’s definition of medical lyricism as the impulse that “draws our attention to delicacy, tenderness and the joyous, and to verve, desire, eroticism, the fecund, abundance and generation,” I argue that Grenfell’s approach to medicine in early 20th-century Newfoundland and Labrador was both a product of his scientific training and his enculturation at the end of the Victorian period.

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Article Jennifer J. Connor (2021) Introduction—Case by Case: Private and Public Representations of Patients in the Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador in the Early 20th Century. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadienne d'Histoire de la Medecine (pp. 340-371). unapi

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