Image Credit: Angels in America, Millennium Approaches (1993) Poster, sourced from Wikimedia Commons under fair use license. Illness narratives often explore experiences that defy medical explanation. Sociologist Arthur Frank, writing about narrative and illness experience, argues that “telling stories is the attempt, instigated by the body’s disease, to give voice to an experience that medicine…
Category: Theory and Practice
Fungal Epistemes and Crip Worldmaking
Image Credit: Photograph of fungal mycelium by Rob Hille, used under Creative Commons licence. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope––or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin. The Art of Noticing, Anna Tsing Crip theory has often sought out conceptual frameworks that…
Take a Hike: A Guidebook for Getting in and out of the Head
In the writer’s guidebook for getting in and out of the head—for overcoming writer’s block— there is a paradoxical complement between the oft proffered advice to “go for a walk” and the instruction to create your “personal writing space.” Walking as a meditative and philosophical practice was famously romanticized in the Enlightenment period by the…
The Chaos Narratives of Undiagnosed Illness
Image: “L’appel du Vide,” by Danielle Wilfand (oil painting). It’s a long story. You sit in front of me, the neurology resident, face half obscured by the computer, fingers poised on the keyboard. You don’t look up. I can see the gears in your head whirring, piecing together how best to boil down my…
Measuring Humanity in Medicine, One Multiple-choice Question at a Time
The day after the U.S. presidential election, I sat for my hospice and palliative medicine board exam along with a colleague, one of my partners. During one long day, we worked our way through 240 questions over a 10-hour timeframe. During a break, my partner observed: “It’s unsatisfying to test our skills in multiple-choice format.”…
The Patient’s Productive Imagination: The Reportability Paradox in Narratives of Contested Illnesses
Contested or invisible illnesses, such as some autoimmune diseases, multi-chemical sensitivity, and chronic Lyme disease, are characterized by the difficulty in identifying biological markers of pathology. These illnesses manifest in symptoms (i.e., subjective, embodied sensations) rather than objective, pathophysiological signs, making them difficult to quantify and verify objectively, according to the expectations of biomedicine (Malterud…
In the Chair, On the Couch: Haircuts and Mental Health
It’s sort of hard to remain current with haircuts as a resident. I usually like to go every six weeks or so to keep my coif from becoming too sheep-dog for clinical medicine. But sometimes, I push it a little longer, with the justification that, “Well, if mustaches are in, so too must other trends…
Black Feminist Healing Arts: A Making of Pedagogy and Praxis
BLACK FEMINIST HEALING ARTS: A MAKING OF PEDAGOGY AND PRAXIS . . . – the inception – It was Summer 2020, at the height of the pandemic, amidst erupting waves of Black grief. And there I was, sittin’ up in my room, preparing to teach my very first university course amidst a global…
The Illuminating Power of Things
I work in a museum that is devoted to the history of healthcare (yes, healthcare, a word deliberately chosen over medicine). As the curator, much of my work is behind the scenes, but I spend a significant chunk of my time interacting with the public and giving tours. It’s a part of the job I…
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…