LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

Steven Soderbergh's pandemic thriller Contagion (2011) remains a timely meditation on the global capitalist networks and quotidian, interpersonal interactions through which infectious disease spreads, with reviews and analyses of the film commending its scientific accuracy and chilling presage of COVID-19. The film's sexualized patient zero plotline demands further scrutiny, however. This essay first traces the evolution of the myth of patient zero throughout the twentieth century, documenting how it fuses the highly stigmatized concepts of scapegoat, superspreader, and slut into both a seemingly innocuous stock character and an established feature of outbreak narrative. Contextualizing Contagion's infidelity plot through the myth of patient zero, this essay then critiques the film's patriarchal and homophobic impulses, encouraging us to reimagine our conceptions of risk, blame, and social connection.

An increasing number of collaborative end-of-life narratives have been published after the death of the protagonist. Focusing on two examples of women's end-of-life memoirs in contemporary German popular culture, this essay examines how relationality, gender, and affectivity shape the philosophies, practices, and politics of palliative care and the associated concepts of the "good death." Ultimately, I argue that the memoirs foreground a still-marginal narrative and practice of dying at home within an intimate public sphere of palliation that transgresses traditional approaches to care for the dying in contemporary health care. They also contribute to gendered and sentimental notions of family care and of the self-determined and autonomous body and death.

This article outlines the findings from research project into community reading groups (Shared Reading) at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Evaluating the potential of Shared Reading to aid in the societal recovery from extensive lockdowns during the pandemic, three themes have emerged: participants found the groups broadened their minds after the diminished intellectual stimulation during social isolation; brought them a sense of calm and focus; and helped them form new social connections. We contextualize these findings using a range of approaches, from reception studies and psychoanalysis to creative/social bibliotherapy and close reading. In particular, we draw on D. W. Winnicott's notion of the transitional space of play and research into the mental health benefits of Shared Reading.

Hydropathy, a popular medical sect in mid-nineteenth-century America, utilized cold water to prevent and treat various ailments. At a time when cold exposure was linked to sickness, how do we account for the widespread appeal of the cold water regimen? By examining the literary production surrounding hydropathy, including medical handbooks, diagnosis records, and patient memoirs, this essay argues that fundamental to the clinical encounter with cold water was the experience of exhilaration-a vital sensation tasked with mediating the tension between the growing enthusiasm for stimulating substances and the mounting anxiety over their depleting effects on the body. Through this lens, the study of hydropathy uncovers the intersecting histories of naturopathic medicine and sensationalist art forms.

This essay explores representations of injection in nineteenth-century medical and literary culture. Through an analysis of medical texts, I show how injection came to be understood through descriptions of racial and gender difference borrowed, in part, from literary culture. By unpacking how moments of injection, perforation, and interpretive crisis in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four rely on tropes of race, gender, and sexuality that nineteenth-century physicians used to understand addiction, this essay underscores the importance of the hypodermic needle for the invention of addiction as a concept ineluctably shaped by the social and political hierarchies of British imperial culture.

This article explores the representation of terminal brain cancer in Marion Coutts's memoir The Iceberg (2014), on her husband's illness and death, and Marco Peano's autofiction L'invenzione della madre (The invention of the mother; 2015), about a son who cares for his mother during her final days. While addressing the medicalization of dying and the efficacy of palliative care, both texts engage pervasively with visual culture. This emphasis on the visual arts and cinema provides a thought-provoking commentary on the protagonists' experience of witnessing the gradual erosion of verbal expression in their dying loved ones. This essay will thus explore both the use of visual culture as palliative praxis and the authors' implicit considerations on the role of narrativity in dying.