Dear Readers, Thank you! Editing, producing, designing (and reading!) this journal has been exceptionally gratifying. We are thankful for the bright and bold writers who each week step out of the confines of their traditional disciplines. We are thankful for being introduced to new ideas, artistic works and academic texts. And we are thankful for…
Hester La Negrita’s Illness Narrative
Phyllisa Deroze // In the Blood (1999) written by the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has received a myriad of critical acclaim and scholarly criticism. This essay is an excerpt from a larger project that I am working on that aims to expand current discussions about the intersectionality of illness narratives, literary studies, and racialized…
Social Classification & Psychiatric Nosologies: W.H.R. Rivers an Anthropologist and a Military Psychiatrist
Sanaullah Khan // W.H.R. Rivers — a seminal experimental psychologist and anthropologist — worked both among the patients of shell shock in the First World War and as an anthropologist in the Torres Strait, where he laid the foundations of kinship studies in anthropology. In this article, I argue that Rivers needs to be understood…
Radium Woman: A Brief History of Dr. Helen Chambers and her Novel Cure for Cervix Cancer
Jessica Kirwan // January is almost gone and perhaps few people have given thought to the fact that it is cervical cancer awareness month. Health calendars are hard to follow, after all (don’t even look at the month of September, which asks you to attend to eight cancer types), but coincidentally this month I became…
(Re-)Producing Sexperimental Knowledge
Brent Arehart // Everybody knows where babies come from. When two people love each other, a stork brings them a child. Where does the stork pick up the baby for distribution? Why, the baby factory, of course. How does the baby factory make babies? Well, they just make them, you know, like a car factory…
"Let us confess it": Review of Amala Poli's Writing the Self in Illness
Sarah Roth // What does it mean to give voice to an experience of illness in literary form, and what modes of attention are asked of a reader as she engages with what is written?
A Look at a Florentine Book of Domestic Medicine
Claire Litt // A recipe book composed four hundred years ago sits on a shelf in Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (1). Its title, “Anon Raccolta di segreti alchimi […]” (Anonymous Collection of Alchemy Secrets […]) is similar to numerous other manuscripts in the collection and does not hint at all at all at the book’s…
Editorial Report: Writers' Retreat
Editorial Team // We are continually impressed by the remarkable diversity of writing, thinking, practice, and activism at work at Synapsis. Now in its third year, our journal has matured into a forum for sustained collaboration across disciplinary and international boundaries — our current contributors hail from North America, the UK, France, Australia, and Romania….
Waiting for Laughter, Part 1: Artistic Collaboration as an Escape from Subjectivity
James Belarde // AUTHOR’S NOTE: Both this article and Part 2 discuss a short play written by the author, summarized below, that can be found in its entirety here. “Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you.” -Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot “Why don’t my doctors laugh…
“Learn Something”: Reflections of a Chronically Ill Graduate Student
Kaitlin Pontzer // When I was I child, I watched movies with my dad. He has always been a lifelong student of films, and he shared these precious experiences with his kids. We sailed with Captain Bligh, sleuthed with Sam Spade, fought the bandit Calavera, searched for gold in the Sierra Madre, and even reached…
Technology, Paranoia, and the Therapeutic Encounter
“This isn’t therapy, what we’ve done. We’ve erased things.” — Heidi Bergman, Homecoming (TV version). Roanne Kantor and Anna Mukamal // This fall I had the pleasure of teaching a course on intersections between disability and technology. In putting together the syllabus, I quickly noticed that one of the most potent sites for this question…
