ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. Eric Maria Remarque was born in the town of Osnabruck in northwestern Germany, to a family of modest means and French ancestry. Remarque's later works dealt with the European political upheavals from the 1920s to the Cold War. Arch of Triumph is not a novel about the practice of medicine, of which Remarque probably had limited knowledge, but he did know well the plight of refugees from Nazi Germany. Dr. Ravic's story sheds some light on the plight of the stateless immigrant without proper documents who happens to be a highly qualified surgeon. Dr. Ravic has erased all connections to the past and assumed a new identity but has preserved his professional integrity. New York was the state that never closed its doors, and more than two-thirds of the medical refugees settled there.
