Doctor-patient interactions in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing, two well-known examples from contemporary Scottish fiction, to see how these novels portray and employ doctor-patient interaction in their respective narratives. Despite their various technical and thematic differences, both novels have female patients encountering male doctors. The paper argues that even in the fictional realm the doctor-patient interaction is almost always a gendered and asymmetrical one.