Wayne Wild

Associate Professor

Affiliated Departments

617-747-8409

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Wayne Wild grew up in New York City and was a pre-med and English major at Columbia University in the ’60s, and part of the 1968 student uprising there. He went on to medical school at Columbia Presbyterian, followed by residency and fellowships in medicine in Boston, and practiced as an internist and gastroenterologist from 1978 to 1993 in the Boston area. Then he decided to go back to school and do something he had loved back in his college days. So he got a Ph.D. in English and American literature at Brandeis University, focusing on 18th-century English literature and 18th-century medicine, especially the rhetoric used by physicians and patients. His book on that subject is called Medicine-by-Post.

Wild has been at Berklee as an associate professor since 2000 and developed two original courses. The first he calls Liberating Aesthetics, which considers aesthetics from the artists' point of view (rather than philosophers), and he published a book to go with it called Liberating Aesthetics: For the Aspiring Artist and the Inspired Audience. More recently, he developed a course called Internal and External Landscapes, which is about how all our identities correspond to landscapes we have experienced throughout life, from home and nature to movies. For fall 2023, he added a new 111 level course called, Personal Identities: Personal Essay, Memoir, Poetry and Lyrics, and Through Fiction. The course explores various forms of self-expression, with attention to how the artist transforms identity within these forms, including fictive identities.

Courses Taught (1)

Introduction to College Writing

LENG-111

Career Highlights

Medical director at Tufts Health Plan
Publications include Medicine-by-Post: The Changing Voice of Illness in Eighteenth-Century British Consultation Letters and Literature (2006); "Due Preparations: Defoe and Dr. Mead and the Threat of Plague" in Liberating Medicine, 1720–1835 (2009), and Liberating Aesthetics: For the Aspiring Artist and the Inspired Audience (Kendall-Hunt, 2015), which is based on a Berklee course on aesthetics not as philosophy, but from the point of view of poets and other artists, intended for budding artists
Presented talk entitled the Rhetorical Origins of Modern Medical Ethics in Enlightenment Scotland, on February 6, 2014, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin
Published in Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726–1832 (2014)

In Their Own Words

"I teach College Writing, including a second-level, focused course I developed called Aesthetics: Artistic Choices, which extends College Writing 1 awareness around the intentionality of writers and artists in their work. The class examines what poets in particular have said about their own artistic intentions. We read Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, and talk about modernism and postmodernism as different attitudes towards creativity and achieving a reality that is alternative to conventional reality. I end with the Antonioni film Blow-up, which contains all the elements of aesthetics we discuss throughout the semester. Students say they learn more about their music through this course. They become more alert to their own intentionality and the fact that they are always making choices, whether taking a photo or playing their instrument."

"The supreme moment of creativity is reaching that level in which you are both entirely engaged with what you're doing and yet aware that you're in it, what Aaron Copland calls being both inside and outside a work simultaneously, as creator or audience. It's kind of an exquisite moment. Poets also speak to that, and how to combine spontaneity with form, to be both Dionysian and Apollonian. That is a supreme aesthetic question I ask students to consider as they learn so much order and form at Berklee, yet want to express their own spontaneous impulses."

"I'm a physician, an internist, and gastroenterologist. I was an English major at Columbia in the ’60s, part of that rebellious group. I practiced medicine from 1978 to 1993 here in Boston, and then I just wanted to go back and do something that I really loved. So I got a Ph.D. in English literature at Brandeis, focusing on 18th-century English lit/medical history and its relationship to history and language. The students call me Doc Wild for fun."

"I have started a new course at Berklee as of spring 2017 called Interior and Exterior Landscapes that investigates how what we see affects how we feel and how what we feel affects what we see in relation to art. Landscape refers to personal landscapes, painting, film, science fiction, and many other landscapes that create our personal and artistic identity."