Mapping Fever: Disease Archives in Ling Ma’s Severance and My Class’s Google Earth Project “The city was operating on a different kind of time,” observes Candace Chen, the protagonist of Ling Ma’s alarmingly prescient 2018 pandemic novel, Severance (248). During the devastating global spread of the fictional Shen Fever, Candace—immune to the disease—begins to take…
Author: Caroline Hensley
Caroline Hensley is a PhD candidate in the English Literary Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on contemporary literatures in which experiences of disability, illness, and healthcare are contextualized within global encounters, such as medical imperialism, disease circulation, migrant care, and transnational travel. She can be contacted at cmhensley@wisc.edu.
“To Break into Pieces” – Puncturing and Preserving the Feminine Self in Leila Chatti’s Deluge (2020)
“To Break into Pieces” – Puncturing and Preserving the Feminine Self in Leila Chatti’s Deluge (2020) The medical root “-rrhagia” at the end of a term signifies an urgent and abnormal rupture accompanied by a shocking burst of liquid, as in hemorrhage (blood loss from a damaged vessel), menorrhagia (excessive menstrual bleeding), or metrorrhagia…
The Anesthetic Soundscape
Written in collaboration with Dr. Megan Hunt, an anesthesiology resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The Anesthetic Soundscape Prelude The anesthesiologist approaches the patient’s bedside, introduces herself, and asks, “Have you had surgery before?” She listens to the lively rhythms of the heart and lungs, seeking out quiet clues of any conditions…
In and On the Clinic
All of my previous trips to our nearby hospital have been marked by blood and bruises. As an especially clumsy individual, I’m used to squeezing paper towels tightly around gashed fingers or pressing ice compresses to a purpling forehead, blinking with the unfocused eyes of someone definitively concussed. Accompanied by my wonderful partner, I am…
Reframing the Cultural Clash: A Literary, Disability Studies Reading of “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”
Anne Fadiman’s 1997 bestselling narrative nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, meticulously outlines the story of Lia Lee. Lia was a young Laotian refugee diagnosed with and unsuccessfully treated for severe epilepsy over the course of her childhood in California…