Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, cast a dark specter in author Thomas Wolfe’s life and literary imagination. During his lifetime, Wolfe (1900-1938) made two visits to Baltimore to see his father, who was undergoing treatment for prostate cancer at the hospital. These visits left lasting impressions on Wolfe and found their way into his brief but penetrating portraiture of “the great engine” of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Of Time and the River. His rendering of the hospital reveals much fear and uncertainty about the place, reflecting Michel Foucault’s assertion that power, notably institutional power, “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself in the actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning process, and everyday lives.” As fate would have it, Wolfe’s final days were also spent at the hospital under the care of Dr. Walter Dandy, the country’s most prominent neurosurgeon during Wolfe’s era. This paper and accompanying visual presentation will explore Wolfe’s rendering of Johns Hopkins Hospital in his fiction, as well as the medical and historical significance of the hospital and Dr. Dandy at the time of Wolfe’s death.
About the presenterPaula G. Eckard
Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Editor, The Thomas Wolfe Review
Book: Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith (University of Missouri Press, 2002)
Book: Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature (University of Tennessee Press, 2016)
Scholarly articles on Lee Smith, Reynolds Price, Thomas Wolfe, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, Anne Tyler, Carter Sickels, and other writers