LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

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.

This essay questions the hegemony of "dignity" in contemporary bioethical debates about good deaths. It does so by exploring how cultural ideals organize the affective setting of death in David Rieff's memoir, Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008), and Maria Gerhardt's novel, Transfer Window [Transfervindue] (2019/2017). In depicting the emotional turmoil of terminal cancer, these pathographies reveal that the very ideals adopted to ensure a sense of dignity (autonomy and family involvement) may sometimes make an impending death even more unbearable. Recognizing lack of affective stability as death's ultimate problem, I utilize the utopian imaginaries of Gerhardt's fiction to suggest "anesthetic deaths" as an alternative bioethical ideal that channels intellectual resources from the Nordic welfare regimes into discussions otherwise marked by liberalism and conservatism.

This essay analyzes two 1990s memoirs of women struggling with hereditary mental illness, who express anxiety about revealing their conditions and about whether their revelations will violate the privacy of their close relations. Midcentury confessional poetry influences the modes of self-disclosure in Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind (1995) and Meri Nana-Ama Danquah's Willow Weep for Me (1998), though the memoirs feature concerns about genetics and biological psychiatry absent from the 1960s confessional poetry. As we show, the language surrounding mental illness structures women's privacy in clinical settings and contains gendered and racial barriers to authentic self-representation. Intersectional language allows women to give voice to their conditions and to access a private identity on their own terms.

There is a buzzing insurgence of interest in medical humanities, narrative medicine, and related arts-based programming aimed at ameliorating some of the tragic failings of our contemporary medical complex and the capitalistic grip it struggles within. This paper examines popular questions posed at the intersections of medicine and arts/humanities* to reveal underlying relationships of power, economy, and malappropriated™ imaginative labor in medical education and clinical settings. To do so, the author presents responses to three exemplary FAQs in unabashedly subjective manifestations of language including sarcasm, lyric, lament, defiance, and poetic wit, then organizes this data into four separate categories: Reframing Retorts, Analogies, Stage Whispers, and Apologetics.This method was not informed by a desire to forge a common language (we can each keep our own TYVM), but rather to place meaning halfway between these systems of knowledge production as a temporary compromise both enterprises can learn from; a sort of consensual linguistic drag, if you will. The results of this probe and analysis are presented in easy-to-skim charts for those even marginally interested in uncovering what is at stake in these imperfect, albeit inspiring, unions.Finally, the author proposes a new form of validating instrument to collect further data and seeks to transmit generalizable knowledge that can deepen our relationships to those around us at these intersections and beyond. A question emerges: is the way humanists and artists are treated in medical institutions analogous to the ways the internal lives of physicians are treated?*Can one really conflate art = humanities? Are they really in the same boat? The author acknowledges this uneasy melding, and asserts that the balance of similarities vs. differences is "context dependent." Read on.**Nota bene, the author is a poet and her biases towards, and knowledge of, poetics are disproportionately represented in her discussion of "the humanities."