ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. Although most of Robertson Davies' novels are arranged as trilogies, The Cunning Man stands alone, perhaps because it is his final novel. The declared subject of the novel is recollection of the cultural life of the city of Toronto, more specifically the small area around the Anglican church of St. Aidan. There are several narrators, of whom the principal one is Dr. Jonathan Hullah, an erudite physician whose approach to practicing medicine is influenced by the writings of Paracelsus. An unconventional physician, Hullah had a good memory and good hands, but was not a surgeon by nature, believing that surgery requires an extraversion of temperament that he lacked. Many doctors referred to him when their patients had exhausted their own endurance; then Hullah became a sort of a Court of Last Resort.
