“Progress and nostalgia in A Visit from the Goon Squad”

In this publication, Dr. Daniel Marchalik and Ann Jurecic write about the tension between yearning for the future and nostalgia for the past in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. This tension also plays out in medicine, where the promises of technical progress threaten to displace the value of face-to-face conversations and physical examinations in clinical practice. The authors thus ask: how we can use these changes to our advantage without jettisoning the past parts of ourselves we value most, or is it mere nostalgia to hope for some elements of the profession to stay as pure and untouched as Scotty’s voice?