Amala Poli // On March 19th, I began attending a three-day Basic Narrative Medicine (NM) Workshop. Like much else in academia during the Covid-19 pandemic, the workshop was held virtually via Zoom sessions. Having attended panels and conferences in the last year on Zoom, I wondered about how this would translate the experience of being…
Tag: Literature
A Reimagined Healing: A Reflection on “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace
Nitya Rajeshuni // I don’t understand why wrinkles are blasphemous. I examined her face framed by wisps of smoky hair, captivated by the zigzagging marks traversing her forehead and chin, parables of her youth tucked neatly in their crevices. I imagined these lines etched into place by a magnificent painter, some with delicacy and precision,…
From Rumi to Herman Hesse, A Contemplation on Optimism: Why Uncertainty is When Hope is Needed Most
Nitya Rajeshuni // I was followed only by the clouds, drifting across glass windowpanes, as I passed my regular landmarks—the coffee shop with live music, the endless roadblocks of construction, the redbrick campus then pink with cherry blossoms. While life is now beginning anew, there were many months in the dark slumber of the pandemic…
“Novum Corpus, Pristina Mens”: Pandemic Forms of Weight Loss, or an Apology in Seven Cantos
Pasquale S. Toscano // Dat sparso capiti vivacis cornus cervi, Dat spatium collo summasque cacuminat aures Cum pedibusque manus, cum longis bracchia mutat Cruribus et velat maculoso vellere corpus; Additus et pavor est. … … ut vero vultus et cornua vidit in unda, ‘me miserum!’ dicturus erat: vox nulla secuta est; Ingemuit: vox illa fuit,…
Upon the Arraignment, Condemnation, and Execution of Elizabeth Stile, 1579
Kate Bolton Bonnici // Elizabeth Stile was executed in England for witchcraft in February 1579. In what follows, I consider an anonymous “news of the day” pamphlet about her case, using critical poetry as scholarly method. (This pamphlet is part of a larger genre of 16th/17th-century writing on witchcraft trials.) I concentrate on the description…
The Beast Within: Mental Illness in Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Miller
Avril Tynan // Throughout the nineteenth century, degeneration theory associated certain behaviours and physical and psychological pathologies with a pseudo-Darwinian atavism of primitive traits and characteristics. One need only think of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, and particularly his 1890 novel La bête humaine (The Beast in Man or The Beast Within), to note the parallels…
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.
Aging Romanticism
Lesley Thulin // William Wordsworth’s pronouncement that the child is the “father of the Man” is perhaps the clearest articulation of British Romanticism’s revaluation of childhood (Wordsworth “My Heart Leaps Up” 7). For Wordsworth, childhood holds critical purchase over adulthood, priming the mind’s receptivity to nature as well as the creative faculty. Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic…
Special Issue Review: Chemistry, Disability, and Frankenstein
Diana Rose Newby // Chemistry, Disability, and Frankenstein, theme issue of Literature and Medicine, vol. 36, no. 2, fall 2018. In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley concludes with well wishes for her creation’s second life: “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (25). Today,…
The Invention of “Greek” Medicine
Calloway Scott // Early histories of medicine in the west typically traced the “invention” of scientific medicine to the “Greek miracle” of the Classical era (500-323 BCE). That this historiographic narrative—offering contemporary medical method and thought a compelling and authoritative origin—suited a wide variety of 19th and early 20th century interests is hardly surprising. Positivist histories of…
