LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

In this article, I present some of the literary and cultural influences behind hospice pioneer Cicely Saunders's idea of "total pain," a term she used from the 1960s onwards to promote the holistic approach which has since become palliative care. Existing studies imply "total pain" emerged from Saunders's own mixed career experiences and her attention to patient narratives. However, I explore how the term originates not only in Saunders's direct encounters with her patients but also in her readings of literary, philosophical, and theological texts from a range of European post-war contexts, from Viktor Frankl and Simone de Beauvoir to Martin Buber and Ladislaus Boros. Examining "total pain" in light of Saunders's reading reveals the particular intellectual milieu-often ignored-from which palliative care emerged.

Research on palliative care emphasizes the crucial role of narratives in the encounter with suffering and dying patients because we need to learn from the dying in order to improve care for them. Autobiographical narratives by terminally ill writers contribute to a more encompassing understanding of what it means to be dying as they often thematize dying and death, besides theorizing all kinds of implications of terminal illness. Among such autothanatographers are well-known writers such as Gillian Rose, Jenny Diski, and Tom Lubbock. The process of writing about the last stage of their lives is palliative narrative praxis because the narrative act alleviates suffering. Exploring dying and death in philosophical, literary, and often highly poetic terms needs to be read and interpreted within a more complex web of meaning-making.

In the novels An Ideal Presence (2020) by Eduardo Berti and La maternité [Maternity] (2012) by Mathieu Simonet, relatives of the dying and palliative care professionals are given a voice. Their experiences highlight "holes" in the cloak of care, which can never protect the terminally ill completely. However, they also raise the question of a pallium for the carers themselves. This need of protection, expressed in both novels by a concern to find the right dosage between caring presence for the terminally ill and self-caring distance from their suffering, risks clashing with the low-tech, high-touch approach associated with the hospice movement. By exposing the limits of palliative care, these (auto-)fictional accounts may prevent inflated expectations in this important medical field.

Contemporary literature about assisted dying in Germany, Switzerland, and France repeatedly explores the impact of illness on romantic relationships. Faced with the imminent or experienced death of their loved one, the healthy partner is affected by existential suffering and refuses to outlive the other. This dynamic leads to (joint) suicide, echoing the literary tradition of the Liebestod, where lovers prefer death over separation. This paper examines three contemporary texts on this theme. It illustrates that while the Liebestod is depicted as a romantic death, it inherently rejects a medicalized end of life. Despite overlaps between palliative care and the notion of a "good death," palliative care is absent, as the focus is on avoiding the existential suffering from losing a beloved partner, making suicide the only viable option.

Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), considered the first American novel, represents the emergent nation's social, political, and architectural landscape as fundamentally shaped by sound. Yet, while voice has garnered much critical attention in regards to American identity, the significance of sound more broadly has been overlooked. This article argues that Brown presents sound as an opportunistic infection that alters physiological function as it circulates between speakers and listeners. In fact, Wieland's soundscape embodies the very qualities scholars like Cathy Caruth associate with traumatic experience: it resists boundaries of place and time; defies linguistic expression; and subjects bodies to shocking, repetitive events that haunt them. Ultimately, I argue that Brown's representation of the audible world generates new understandings of how trauma moves between and within bodies.

In The Last Man, Mary Shelley relies on theories of Romantic medicine that give her an unconventional way to conceptualize and narrate time and space. For the Romantics, organs, bodies, and communities were all intimately connected through "sympathy." The Last Man carefully employs the connection between biological sympathy and contagious disease to consider how suffering inhabits space. Lionel's individual suffering intertwines with the global suffering from the fictional plague of the novel, which threatens the boundaries of both Europe and the white, European body much as its non-fictional counterpart, cholera, does. As time and history grind to a halt, space is disconcertingly reconfigured by shrinking geographical distances between Black and white bodies, which threatens the cohesion of white identity even as it reinforces its sovereignty.