The Scenes of Doctor-Patient meeting in the Contemporary Korean Novels: chiefly on the basis of Doctor's Reading on Patients

Lee, Sang Gyu

Abstract

"Medicine as an art" implies that there is something in medicine beyond the limit of science The practice of medicine is far more than the simple application of scientific principles to a particular biologic aberration The communication between a doctor and a patient is the core component of medical practice but little attention has been generally drawn to it. This study shows three types of doctor's reading on 'patient' as an alternative model to see the doctor-patient communication on the basis of the concept of 'patient as a text' and Bakhtin's narrative theory They are monologic dialogic and discontinuous readings In the monologic reading the doctor has one-sidedly the whole power in communication and it reflects only the doctor's point of view The doctor mainly concerns for the disease and its treatment In the dialogic reading the power of doctor-patient is shared and their views are reflected each other The doctor should consider the patient as a human and understand his social and psychological surroundings If the patient refuses to be treated especially in the case of terminal cancer patient he has nothing to do with his doctor Therefore the discontinuous reading can be applied and in result no communication takes place between them. To evaluate the proposed types of the doctor's reading on patient the three types can be applied to the scene of doctor-patient meeting in the novels The meetings of lieutenant Sung and medical officers in Sending Back by Jung-In Suh are in accordance with the type of monologic reading In Wan-Seo Park's Three Days in the Fall the type of dialogic reading can be applied to that of the doctor I's lives with her patients In Yong-Moon Chun's The Days of Dead Doctors the type of discontinuous reading can be applied to the events between Haeng-Oh Kim and doctors in ICU And the 3 parts of The Heavens of Your Own by Chung-Joon Yi all of reading types can be equal to those of the hero whose figure and relationship with Sorok Island have changed throughout the work. The doctors should have abundant experiences of life to make the dialogic reading possible The dialogic reading can be realized in its true sense only if they see the patient not as a disease but as a man and only if they make efforts to understand his circumstances