ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the interdisciplinary intersection between literature and medicine, and how such a crossroads comes to the fore in poems ranging from Raymond Carvers earliest publications to the final days of his writing career. It explains Carvers poetry career as an artistic journey in which he recycled a number of features from modernism and postmodernism to ultimately arrive at the idiosyncratic vernacular style of his final years. The chapter considers Carvers poetry career in light of an analogy between a scientific approach to medicine in which the patient becomes an object to be studied, and a postmodern aesthetic in literature that underlines the arbitrary nature of language. The doctor patient relationship is the subject of two poems that are frequently read in med schools, What the Doctor Said and Proposal. Carver's early mentor William Carlos Williams sums this up succinctly in the chapter Of Medicine and Poetry in his Autobiography: Any worth-his-salt physician knows no one is cured.
