‘We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from god to the medical profession’ : medicine in mainstream literature : part 2

Abstract

The locus classicus that, arguably, above all other works, demonstrates the duality of human nature in all of mankind, including in the medical profession, is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) wherein doctors are portrayed as weak and fallible, primarily because of the potential abuse of their special knowledge and abilities.12 The duality of man’s psyche is the story’s overriding theme, an allegory of mankind’s permanent inner conflict between good and evil through the potential dissociation of a single entity into two opposing selves. The story was recently rewritten by Steven Moffat as Jekyll and billed as a modern-day sequel to the original novella.