ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. The British novelist Ian McEwan, born in Aldershot in England in 1948, was educated at Eton, the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia, where he took a creative writing course taught by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. His first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, which won the Somerset Maugham award in 1976. The novel Saturday, considered by some critics as his best, received the James Tall Black Memorial Prize for 2005. The novel records events taking place on a single day, February 15, 2003, in the life of a 48-year-old neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, who is a senior physician in a teaching hospital in London. Dr. Perowne receives a call from his anesthetist friend asking him to operate on Baxter because the complexity of the traumatic injury requires unusually skillful handling.
