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…
Tag: illness narratives
Book Review: Entry Points into Serious Illness and Facial Disfigurement through Kathleen Watt’s “Rearranged”
“Don’t be afraid of the blood and guts,” Kathleen Watt smiled while signing a copy of her book: “there are many entry points.” Watt, a former New York City opera singer, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer that initially filled the space behind her right cheekbone and continued to spread—“occupying the space where…
The Geographic Self
The Communication of Pain In her book The Body in Pain, Scarry discusses the way that pain “shatters language” and threatens to be “unsharable” (4,5). She describes how pain belongs to an internal geography, when one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to…
The Performance of Pain
You cannot breathe; the world slows down around you; your chest tightens as you walk to your car. Once again, you feel as though you have failed to convince a doctor of your pain, and once again, you must face it alone. This is, unfortunately, the experience of far too many female patients, but the…
Coffee with a Colleague: Physician, Author, and Educator, Jay Baruch, MD
Sarah Berry // This interview series features educators, scholars, artists, and healthcare providers whose work is vital to the growth of the health humanities. On Thursday, May 12, I interviewed Dr. Jay Baruch about his forthcoming essay collection Tornado of Life (MIT Press, August 2022), as well as medicine, narrative, and the role of writing…
Medicine’s martial metaphors: “Fighting the good fight”
Steve Server // In 1977’s Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag offered a prescription for the “most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill” (3). As Sontag noted, some of the ways in which humans make meaning on “the night-side of life” may hamper our ability to suffer in a “healthy” way (3). “As long…
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series (I)
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series tackling Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
Book Review: Narrative Art and the Politics of Health
Steven Rhue // Narrative Art and the Politics of Health stands out as wonderful collection of essays that unites disparate stories of health and wellbeing entangled with in the politics of medicine and healing. Brooks and Blanchette have carefully organized this assortment of writings in three thematic divisions. Part 1 of the volume concerns institutional narratives that confront…
“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?
Light and Shadows: On Care and Loss
Sarah Roth // My mother and I divide up her Hospice bags: two nondescript fanny packs holding morphine, liquids, and nutrition. Artifacts of the land of the critically ill, they are contraband here in the clinic.