Literature About Medicine | Andrew Solomon | Electric Literature | 23rd June 2016

Language is central to medicine. It is very hard to cure a condition that cannot be described. “Even veterinarians, trained to diagnose animals who cannot put their complaints into words, begin by labelling the illness and proceed by specifying the treatment.” Every visit to the doctor is a test of both parties’ language skills: “He seems not to understand the problem because you can’t describe it lucidly enough. You don’t understand the proposed treatment because he can’t explain it”