LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

This article sheds new light on the human-animal binary in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century psychiatry by considering the therapeutic uses of non-human animals during the early years of the York Retreat (1796-1813). By considering both figurative and "real" uses of non-human animals at the Retreat, I demonstrate how the figure of the animal in institutional discourse shifted towards primarily representing the patient's docility rather than unreason. The essay proceeds to show how shifts in the conceptualization of animality affected how medical practitioners and theorists engaged with the language of mental patients. Through a close reading of a patient's poem, I demonstrate how the patient's capacity for self-expression challenges the institutional hierarchies which were maintained through the human-animal division, as the poem ironizes the institutional desire to reproduce patients as "humane animals" which could be safely resocialized and reintroduced into society.

Medical error can be a devastating experience for medical practitioners who are often called the "second victims" of medical mistakes. The emotional toll medical error takes on doctors is not well understood, with few studies investigating shame and/or guilt in response to making mistakes. This essay considers how fiction and medical nonfiction might contribute to this understanding, by exploring the relation between shame, guilt, and medical error in Ann Patchett's novel State of Wonder (2011) alongside Danielle Ofri's autobiographical reflections in her essay, "Ashamed to Admit It: Owning up to Medical Error," later reprinted as part of a chapter entitled "Burning with Shame" in What Doctors Feel (2013).

Critics have widely regarded Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep (1927) as an ironic novel about pain: a satire of modern life's supposed promise that pain can be avoided. This essay argues that Wharton's novel is as much about managing pain as it is about avoiding it. I consider the novel in light of experiences of chronic pain and illness, both Wharton's and my own. My analysis finds that while the novel's satire targets the fleeing of pain, the text also engages aspects of life lived with pain. The characters demonstrate constant fatigue, a symptom of pain's presence; they undertake mental, physical, and care practices as modes of pain management; and the text's formal structures suggest chronic pain's duration. By focusing not on direct representations of pain but on how pain can condition a life (and a narrative), I elucidate the ongoing value of making a distinction between managing pain and avoiding it.

This essay examines the challenge of breastfeeding in Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, specifically how the process of learning to feed, significant in both her own and her mother's traumatic entrances into motherhood, enables Bui to face the "terrifying thought" that, upon giving birth, "FAMILY is now something [she has] created." By situating her narrative in the context of feeding her son, Bui amplifies the associations between the act of providing nourishment and the matrilineal responsibility of satiating a hunger for familial connection. In illustrating this association, Bui depicts the nuanced layers of breastfeeding difficulty and failure, especially for women mothering in the context of generational trauma. Within a biomedical context, Bui's narrative illustrates how breastfeeding difficulties, and their emotional toll, may be reminiscent of diasporic losses of cultural and familial connection, prompting practitioners to consider more broadly the roots of their patients' breastfeeding anxieties.