ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. Frances Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1921. In 1925 Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, thought by many critics to be the finest American novel ever written. Much of Fitzgerald's writing was autobiographical. His wife's intense and flamboyant personality was the model for many of his heroines and, after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1930, for Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night. Nicole is a very beautiful, fragile, capricious, immensely rich young American patient at the institution where Dick pursues his studies and gathers material for his scientific writing. Dick Diver is hardly a model of a physician or a psychiatrist. The profession is accidental to the intended theme of a talented, successful young man corrupted by the purposeless life amid the rich and idle, culminating in self-destruction by alcohol.
