What is it like to lose a limb and gain a prosthetic? How would you communicate to others this embodied experience and make sense of having to incorporate technology into your bodily identity? In October’s post, I introduced Harry Parker’s recent novel Anatomy of a Soldier, a semi-autobiographical account of limb loss and prosthetic gain….
Tag: Literature
What Does Defamiliarization Make Happen?
Anna Fenton-Hathaway I learned the literary term “defamiliarization” years after it had upended a tiny part of my worldview. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), narrated by the horse of the title, was the vehicle for that early upending. One particularly heart-rending chapter meant that for years I could not look at a horse without being…
Metaphors in Medicine
Charlene Kotei Communication is one of humanity’s oldest and most sophisticated technologies. Narrative is an integral part of the day-to-day transmission of ideas between people. In the medical world, technological and scientific advances have likewise made tremendous advances. And yet, the medical field still lacks the key to success: the effective interpretation of narrative. To…
Indigenous Poetics and Narrative Medicine
What exactly is narrative medicine, and how is it different from the work of humanities scholars who investigate medical topics? With this problem in mind, I set out to explore the roots of narrative medicine–not in academic medical schools, but in North American indigenous practices of healing through ritual storytelling. In our moment, narrative medicine…
The Suffering Caregiver
Benjamin Gagnon Chainey ‘Is the experience of pain preferable to the anihilation of experience?[1]’ Hervé Guibert, Le mausolée des amants The question posed by Hervé Guibert, a French writer who died in 1991, while he was HIV-positive at the apex of the Western AIDS epidemic, resounds from the darkest areas of his terminal phase….
Menopause: The Female Mummy’s Curse
Fig. The Opening of the Tomb of Nitocris by Darius (?) – René-Antoine Houasse circa 1686 Daisy Butcher The nineteenth century’s fascination with Egypt reached its apogee in the Mummy novel—from Jane Webb Loudon’s 1827 The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, the first book to feature a reanimated Egyptian mummy, to Bram…
The Reproductive Sublime in Anthropocenic Literature, Part I: The Frankenstein Bicentennial
Livia Arndal Woods Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) has a big birthday on the horizon, a whole host of celebrations are afoot to mark the occasion, and this is the second Medical Health and Humanities blog post in as many weeks to take the novel as its subject. This hubbub reflects not only the perennial popularity…
Exploring the Human Side of Military Medicine Through Anthropomorphised Objects. Part One.
Figure One. On display in the photograph are examples of modern prosthetic legs. Taken with permission at the National Army Museum, London. Have you ever wondered what it is like to be an object involved in the treatment of an injured soldier? In Harry Parker’s recent novel, Anatomy of a Soldier, he tells the story…
Embodied Prisons
Sneha Mantri Little Dorrit is, above all, a novel about prisons. In addition to the literal Marshalsea prison that is home for the Dorrit family in the first half of the novel, we are taken to the Circumlocution Office, a bureaucratic imprisonment of any sort of innovation, and the Clennam house, which Mrs. Clennam never…
My Graphic Medicine Journey (Part One)
The idea that life is a journey made up of different stages is one that has appeared across time, in different cultures and media. It is a concept that is ingrained in our collective psyches, and cannot be escaped, being present in the way we choose to live, think, and speak about our lives.