“The aspects of death and sex are intimately intertwined for both are part of life,” begins a 1968 article in the Journal of Sex Research; “This applies for the normally healthy human being in general, but it has special meaning for the patient with a life threatening disease such as cancer” (Schon 288). Published in…
Author: Emily Waples
Emily Waples is Associate Professor of Biomedical Humanities and Director of the Center for Literature and Medicine at Hiram College.
Garth Greenwell is my Emergency Contact: Meditations on Small Rain
Fittingly, I begin this in a hospital. I am in the vascular medicine department of the Cleveland Clinic, awaiting a routine follow-up ultrasound for the “minimally invasive” procedure I had last week, when I begin organizing my notes for an essay on Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain (2024). I say minimally invasive, because this…
Witness and Care in Rob Delaney’s A Heart That Works
A year ago, I found myself sobbing in my kitchen at Rob Delaney’s direction. I was one chapter into A Heart That Works, Delaney’s memoir about the illness and death from brain cancer of his two-year-old son, Henry. As both an avid fan of Delaney’s Amazon television series Catastrophe and a health humanities educator who…
Don’t Forget: Notes Toward Totalities
Five times a day, my watch informs me I am going to die. This isn’t the beginning of a thriller—no stalking by some sinister, sentient AI. It’s an experiment with WeCroak, the app purportedly “inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times a day.” Dutifully, WeCroak…
Memories of “Literature, Medicine & Memory: A Symposium in Memory of Dr. Carol Donley”
For many, the medical humanities’ origin story is set on a hill in northeast Ohio. As early as 1985, Hiram College’s Dr. Carol Cram Donley, a professor of English, spearheaded a collaboration between the small, rural liberal arts college and Northeast Ohio University College of Medicine (now Northeast Ohio Medical University), working in collaboration with…
Everyday Disaster Ethics
This week, the WHO announced that it would cease to designate COVID-19 a “public health emergency of international concern,” affirming its status instead as an “established and ongoing health issue.” There is a distinction between the emergent and the established, the epidemic and the endemic, the disastrous and the everyday. Bioethics often traffics in disaster—in the…
Against Breasts
More than 16,000 mastectomies were performed in England and Wales in 2009-2010, mine among them. Due to the size of the tumor, the surgeon explained, it would not be possible to perform “breast conserving therapy” (BCT)—more often more referred to in the U.S. by the awkward Latinate term lumpectomy, and in the UK as a…
Jane Austen’s Autopsies
I confess I have not watched the much-maligned adaptation of Persuasion that dropped on Netflix yesterday. But wait, there’s more: I have never read Persuasion. I know. I know. Just as soon as I am finished here, I will slam this laptop closed in trepidation and shame and await the revocation of my English PhD….
How We Teach How We Die
Emily Waples // This year—the most difficult year of my professional and personal life to date—I inherited a class called “How We Die.” Offered as part of my college’s Biomedical Humanities major, as well as fulfilling an “ethics and social responsibility” requirement for our general education curriculum, this four-credit course met for two hours twice…
Notes on Grim
Emily Waples// Last week, we reached a point in this pandemic that has been some eighteen months in the making: more Americans have now died of COVID-19 than of the 1918-1919 flu. I’ve been dreading the moment less for the fact of it than for the fanfare, anticipating the precise terms in which I knew…