Erectile dysfunction and the post war novel: The Sun Also Rises and In Country

• Published in: Literature and medicine Vol. 30; no. 1; p. 86
• Main Author: Klaver, Elizabeth
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Johns Hopkins University Press 2012
• Subjects: Advertisements; American literature; Cultural change; Disorders; Drugs; Erectile Dysfunction; Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961); History, 20th Century; Humans; Legislation; Literary criticism; Male; Mason, Bobbie Ann; Medicine in Literature; Narration - history; Novels; Quality of life; Sexual disorders; Sexuality; Television; Veterans - psychology; Vietnam War; War literature
• ISSN: 0278-9671; 1080-6571
• DOI: 10.1353/lm.2012.0012

On the one hand, according to the medical model of disability, the dysfunctional penis would be considered an impairment to the body and a reduction in the quality of life; on the other hand, according to the social model of disability, the fact of penile impairment does not necessarily point to the inability of an individual to function well in everyday life.2 On a more practical level, given the rates of erectile dysfunction today, disability legislation and services would have to be redrawn drastically to deal with the sufferers of erectile dysfunction. Since the focus of trauma studies tends to be on memory and the reliving of particularly terrifying experiences, whether individual and/ or cultural, trauma studies would work well as a methodology for In Country, less so for The Sun Also Rises. After the Great War, Erectile Dysfunction, and The Sun Also Rises Anyone who has watched television lately has surely seen the advertisements for Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs, sold to the estimated 18 million men who have some sort of impotence difficulty, either never having experienced an erection (primary impotence) or occasionally failing to obtain or maintain an erection (secondary impotence).4 As Angus McLaren points out in Impotence: A Cultural History, the medicalization of male sexuality has definitively occurred in the early twenty-first century with seventy-five percent of impotence problems seen to be based on physical factors such as disease, prescription drug use, or vascular and prostate problems.5 This was not always the case, however.