ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. Graham Greene was an influential playwright, novelist, travel writer and critic. Early in life he converted to Catholicism, from which he often transgressed in his personal life, but Catholic religious themes are at the root of many of his novels. Dr. Colin is a minor character in the novel A Burnt-Out Case, published in 1960. The hero of the story is Querry, a womanizer, world-famous architect and builder of modern Catholic churches. In The Human Factor, perhaps the most exquisitely structured of all Greene's novels, encounter Dr. Percival, a stout little rosy man in tweeds, overindulging in food and alcohol and conversing about fishing and modern painting. Dr. Percival is anxious to carry out an experiment using aflatoxin, a highly toxic substance liberated by a mold formed on rotten peanuts, because tiny doses of aflatoxin destroy liver cells in experimental animals.
