ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. Abraham B. Yehoshua was born in Jerusalem in 1936 in the fifth generation of a Sephardic Jewish family. He is a member of the new generation of Israeli writers who moved from the social concerns of earlier authors to focus on the individual and interpersonal. In open heart the author portrays the medical scenes accurately and with great detail, a remarkable example of which is the coronary artery bypass performed on Mr. Lazar. It is difficult to predict what will happen to Dr. Benjamin Rubin. In this and several other novels of Yehoshua, sexual obsession plays a large role, but medicine is a new theme. He delivers the profession of medicine two unkindly cuts – a doctor failing to curb his sexual drive and the unnecessary death of a middle-aged man after a routine, ordinarily low-risk procedure – the victim of medical politics.
