{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,28]],"date-time":"2026-01-28T08:02:13Z","timestamp":1769587333952,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":31,"publisher":"BMJ","funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100020950","name":"National Science and Technology Council","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["NSTC 114-2410-H-032-025 -"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["NSTC 114-2410-H-032-025 -"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100020950","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["bmj.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Med Humanities"],"accepted":{"date-parts":[[2025,12,21]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>\n                    This article compares William Carlos Williams\u2019s short story \u2018The Use of Force\u2019 (1938) and Tess Gerritsen\u2019s novel\n                    <jats:italic>The Surgeon<\/jats:italic>\n                    (2001) to explore how biomedical care can slide into coercion and how clinical spaces oscillate between sanctuary and sacrilege. Building on Michel Foucault\u2019s formulation of clinical vision, together with Julia Kristeva\u2019s account of abjection and Ren\u00e9 Girard\u2019s sacrificial theory, I propose a three-strand analytic\u2014power\/knowledge, Gothic embodiment and parareligious affect\u2014supplemented by an ecoGothic perspective that scales clinical violence from flesh to environment. Through close reading, the essay shows how Williams\u2019s intimate house call converts beneficent intention into brute force, while Gerritsen\u2019s medical thriller grotesquely weaponises medical expertise: the gaze that sees also dominates, and instruments of cure\u2014tongue depressor, spoon, scalpel\u2014become ritual implements that breach bodily borders. Attending to gendered vulnerability and trauma poetics, the analysis situates Gerritsen\u2019s femicidal surgeries within patriarchal control and foregrounds the counter-agency of Jane Rizzoli and Catherine Cordell. Placing a modernist vignette beside a 21st century medical thriller, the article maps both continuities and ruptures in the ontological, epistemic and ethical stakes of clinical authority, tracing how sacrificial logic, secular priesthood and toxic ecologies persist across periods. The contribution is twofold: to Gothic studies, by clarifying medicine\u2019s parasacral volatility and its ecological imaginaries; and to bioethics and the medical humanities, by articulating a normative claim that only practices disciplined by consent, narrative reciprocity and institutional accountability can sustain the secular covenant of care. Otherwise, curative ritual hardens into authorised brutality, and knowledge is purchased through a sacrificial economy in which\n                    <jats:italic>cura<\/jats:italic>\n                    collapses into cruelty. Such findings refine debates on clinical paternalism, narrative ethics and trauma representation in literature.\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1136\/medhum-2025-013608","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,27]],"date-time":"2026-01-27T18:20:34Z","timestamp":1769538034000},"page":"medhum-2025-013608","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1136\/crossmarkpolicy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["From altar to autopsy table: ecological imaginaries, medical violence and parareligious affect in William Carlos Williams\u2019s \u2018The Use of Force\u2019 and Tess Gerritsen\u2019s\n                    <i>The Surgeon<\/i>"],"prefix":"10.1136","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8893-9359","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Max Chia-Hung","family":"Lin","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of English, Tamkang University, New Taipei, Taiwan"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"239","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,27]]},"reference":[{"key":"2026012710202511000_medhum-2025-013608v1.1","unstructured":"Foucault M . 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