In this impressive work of historical research and literary analysis, Sari Altschuler argues that literature and the imagination were vital to the production of medical knowledge in early America and must be acknowledged in the health professions today. The Medical Imagination shows that before the founding of the American Medical Association Council on Medical Education (1904) and the release of the Abraham Flexner Report (1910), strict divides between the humanities and medicine did not exist. Rather, in early America, “medical knowledge was understood to be formed in the mind of the brilliant observer not through depersonalized, objective observation” (9). Altschuler compares the philosophies of physicians who were also fiction writers and poets, demonstrating that physicians found that crafting literature offered chances for them to explore some of the most difficult problems of the body during tumultuous times of change. 

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