Girolamo Fracastoro’s sixteenth-century epic poem Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus tells the story of a shepherd who was stricken with a particularly unpleasant condition after insulting the sun god Apollo. A self-proclaimed “medical essay,” Syphilis offers an origin story for the New World disease, a celebration of its contemporary cure (mercury), and a number of behaviors…
Category: Gender and Sexuality
Bloodstains and Bedclothes: Gendered Labor and Embodiment in Samantha Irby’s “Hysterical!”
“Maybe I am dead and this is hell,” thinks American comedian and writer Samantha Irby upon waking in a hotel room in Texas, drenched in a “congealed pool of blood so deep you’d need galoshes to wade through it” (106). In her essay “Hysterical!” from her 2020 collection titled Wow, No Thank You, Irby outlines…
A Portrait of Care in Motion: Lauren W. Westerfield’s Woman House
Accompanying her mother for her ECT treatment at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, Lauren W. Westerfield devours Jean Frémon’s Now, Now, Louison over two consecutive nights. Frémon’s book, as he states and Westerfield herself echoes, is a “portrait in motion.” Rather than a crude biography, it is composed as the inner dialogue…
Book Review: Field Guide to Falling Ill by Jonathan Gleason
Medical interpreters occupy a contradictory position: present at a patient’s most vulnerable moments, they are expected to remain invisible, rendering one language into another without leaving a trace of themselves in the exchange. In Field Guide to Falling Ill (Yale UP, 2026), Jonathan Gleason takes that role as both literal subject and critical methodology. Across…
Love Hurts, But Where? A Brief History, from Lovesickness to Limerence
Readers of medieval romance were all too familiar with a common trope of modern romance novels: love is pain. Andreas Capellanus opens his famous twelfth-century treatise on romantic love by calling love “a certain inborn suffering,” a malady most commonly afflicting young noble-born men for whom the sight of (and subsequent meditation upon) his beloved’s…
Cuteness as Critique: Diseased Pariah News and the Visual Politics of HIV/AIDS
Images of sexually transmitted infections in public health campaigns have long drawn on tropes related to pollution, contamination, and a decaying society in order to dissuade the public from engaging in “irresponsible” sexual behavior (Brandt 5). From early twentieth-century government posters, such as the one pictured above, that linked disease to gendered and racialized tropes…
Thresholds of the Body
This spring, when I was recovering from a double mastectomy, I consumed a lot of media. Propped up on a wedge pillow as family and friends filtered through with food and news of the world outside, I binged season after season of television and read through some of this year’s buzzy novels. As the weeks…
Sex for the Dying: Palliative Kink and FX’s Dying for Sex
“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…
Book Review: Flood by Christine Kalafus
At the heart of Christine Kalafus’ upcoming memoir Flood (2025) is a powerful image: a rush of water, not a deluge from the skies but a slow rising from below, invisibly soaking through the porous foundations of an old house until, before you know it, you are wading ankle deep in what was the solid…
Infrastructural Freedom Dreaming: On Jina B. Kim’s “Care at The End of The World”
Image Credit: © Jina B. Kim, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025), reproduced under fair use provision (review). Jina B. Kim begins her new book – as the title, Care at The End of The World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (2025),…