Abstract
In his 1993 novel Headhunter, Canadian author Timothy Findley describes the tendency of some medical practitioners to put scientific interests above the therapeutic needs of the individual. As the book's title and name of the main character Dr. Kurtz attest, Findley reflects the colonialist teleology found in Heart of Darkness as an analogue for the therapeutic zeal shown by many of the physicians in Headhunter. In the novel, such zeal is especially problematic when it is combined with so-called enhancement technologies, since enhancement, like colonialism, can be based in the prejudices of the practitioner and/or the dominant society, rather than in the needs of the patient. To counter therapeutic zeal, Findley, like Conrad, proposes an ethics of restraint in which the practitioner's empathy outweighs his or her desire for scientific discovery.
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Notes
Many critics have discussed Findley’s intertexts in Headhunter. In addition to Heart of Darkness and Frankenstein, the novel contains references to Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Susanna Moodie’s visit to the Toronto Lunatic Asylum in Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush—and this list is not exhaustive. One can even make the case, given the equation in the novel between feeding the birds and a rejection of business and political power structures, for Mary Poppins as an intertext.
Findley dedicates Headhunter to R.E. Turner and acknowledges Dr. R.E. Turner as a member of the staff of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, Toronto (Roberts 1994, 121).
Couser focuses on auto/biography and “the ethics of representing vulnerable subjects—persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship but are unable to represent themselves in writing or to offer meaningful consent to their representation by someone else” (xii). However, as Couser states, the term “vulnerable subject” can easily apply to the physician/patient relationship (15).
In a confessional scene very similar to the one between Dr. Marlow and Dr. Kurtz in Headhunter, Mr. Kurtz says in Heart of Darkness: “I had immense plans. . . . I was on the threshold of great things,” 107.
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Reed, S. ‘Murder by Milligrams’: Enhancement Technologies and Therapeutic Zeal in Timothy Findley’s Headhunter”. J Med Humanit 33, 161–173 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-012-9178-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-012-9178-4