LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

In the world of medicine, shame's potential is ever-present and attempts to keep it at bay may only induce it all the more intensely. In this short story by the often-anthologized physician-writer Richard Selzer, the narrator witnesses a surgery to repair a young girl's cleft palate that leads to her untimely death. Later, the narrator realizes that the surgeon performed reconstructive surgery on the girl's corpse. Arguably, the surgeon has attempted not only to repair the girl's face, but to preserve his own social face from shame as well. And while the narrator may want to absolve the surgeon from such a dubious act, in doing so he reveals his own shameful complicity. Selzer's short story thus demonstrates how shame is transitive, an affect that crosses borders and saturates all those who come into its contact.

In this essay, I explore how Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love and Kate Zambreno's To Write as If Already Dead contest the relationship between illness and shame through their renegotiation of the confessional form. Both memoirs, in their incorporation of other authorial positions ranging from case notes to novels, address an interlocutor, whose presence halts the circulation of shame. Consequently, I argue that Sedgwick and Zambreno enact a kind of reparative reading within their memoirs' form, and I trace how the relationality of their works moves towards repairing the harms of medicalized shame. Counter to current debates around post-critique and the method wars, I discuss how Sedgwick and Zambreno's memoirs model their own reading practice within their pages, a practice that is inextricable from their understanding of shame and illness.

U.S. medical series have, since 1975, regularly integrated guest transgender characters as patients but limit patient and doctor interactions to problems caused by or related to their medical transition. An analysis of more than 18 different U.S. scripted medical dramas series aired between 1975 to 2018 demonstrates how the professional authority of the main characters often validates the character's gender dysphoria, but the narrative questions the validity of its presumed solution (gender transition) and delegitimizes the outcome (gender identity as a basis of gender instead of one's sex). These series do so by presenting the distinction between the sex (as assigned at birth) and gender identity of trans guest characters as so significant that attempts to prioritize the latter over the former, or hide its existence, are characterized as shameful and associate gender transition with deception and selfishness, thereby contributing to current transphobic debates across the United States.

Shame is a temporally sensitive emotion highly relevant to the healthcare context and culturally inscribed within medical education in the United States and United Kingdom. Drawing from feminist, phenomenological, and queer of color conceptions of time and shame, this essay uses narratology to analyze popular medical memoirs of medical training. I propose two primary modes of time within medical training-a linear time and a future-oriented time-and map them onto chronic and acute shame experiences as represented in medical memoirs. Anecdotes from these memoirs suggest both the challenges of medical training and potential opportunities for reshaping the training narrative to better support diverse student experiences and turn the system towards shame-sensitive, humanistic patient care.

Alice Hattrick's Ill Feelings (2021) is a "genre-bending" long-form essay; its title's dual meaning underlines the entanglement of symptoms and shame that occur when illness is seen as having no explanation. This paper brings Ill Feelings into dialogue with a spoken account of unexplained illness to illuminate the distinct ways in which it shapes both lives and texts. The shame that occurs for those living with "ill feelings" is characterized by a sense of (in)visibility: by feeling simultaneously seen and unseen. I investigate how diagnostic labels employed in these contexts render suffering and sufferers (in)visible, and illuminate how fusing genres offers Hattrick a particular form of (controlled) visibility. Finally, I consider the implications of this analysis for our broader understanding of shame, and for our approach to literary life writing.

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• Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages: From England to the Mediterranean ed. by Elma Brenner and François-Olivier Touati
• Kaitlin Sager (bio)

Elma Brenner and François-Olivier Touati's edited volume, Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages: From England to the Mediterranean, is an invaluable addition to the body of work on leprosy in the medieval period. Encompassing the overlapping disciplines of history of medicine, [End Page 225] cultural history, art history, as well as new findings in bioarchaeology, osteology, and paleopathology owing to innovations in ancient DNA (aDNA) research, this book successfully bridges the gap between the sciences and the humanities in disease studies. By focusing on identity as the central concept in their study, the contributors to this volume manage to dispel oft-repeated myths about medieval leprosy in Western Europe, especially the idea that its sufferers were subjected to complete isolation and institutional neglect and had to resort to mendicancy to survive. With a focus on both institutional and non-institutional constructions of identity around leprosy, the book not only addresses those who suffer from the infection, but also the communities with whom they interacted and to which they claimed membership. Leprosy and Identity is an essential read not only for scholars of the Middle Ages, but for anyone interested in the social history of disease. Its thoroughly researched chapters by scholars from a wide variety of disciplines help to make sense of an illness whose sufferers have been heavily stigmatized and historiographically misrepresented as social pariahs. This research reintegrates leprosy sufferers into complex social and institutional contexts, complicating and problematizing the simplified historical narrative of leprosy as a taboo disease which resulted in social isolation and rejection.

Contributors to the volume address leprosy in many different geographical and chronological contexts but remain in conversation with one another by focusing on institutional settings, material histories, and language to better understand the experiences and identities of communities affected by leprosy. The book is comprised of five parts, with one to three chapters in each section. Part 1, "Approaching Leprosy and Identity," contains broad surveys based on geographical, historical, and archaeological data, helping to ground the reader in the historical and religious myths around the origins and initial spread of the infection. In chapter 3, for example, Damien Jeanne