HIS 40760: Approaches to Medical History
Dr. Laura Kelly
David Kilgannon
14204931
MA in the Social & Cultural History of Medicine
Essay Prompt: How valuable are fictionalised representations of an illness to the historian of medicine?
Introduction
‘Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache’
The above quotation from Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘On Being Ill’ (1926) helps to capture some of the piece’s central argument around sickness and art, bemoaning that ultimately ‘illness has not taken its place with love, battles, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.’ Indeed, for Woolf, fictional works remain woefully incapable of accounting for the ‘daily dramas of the body,’ as from deadly disease to shortsightedness, fiction persistently addresses Illness in a circumspect, refractory manner. Of course, in attempting to make such an argument, Woolf must commit a myopia of her own in ignoring a broad swath of literature,
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Such a narrative of ‘false confidence, now, as a warning’ is clearly reminiscent of Burney’s didactic purpose, highlighting the social role of Belinda as a breast cancer narrative. Initially, Lady Delacour asks her quack practitioner to perform a mastectomy, but “he was afraid to hazard it, and he prevailed upon her to give up the scheme, and to try some new external remedy from which he promised wonders” (259). When Belinda discovers that Lady Delacour has been undergoing these fraudulent ‘treatments’, the medicines have weakened Lady Delacour having ‘affected her head in the most alarming
The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” knows she is sick, but the men in her life do not think she is seriously ill. Her husband, John, and her brother are both physicians of high standing, so she does not know what to do when they diagnose her as being perfectly healthy. Even though she does not agree with their remedies, she has no say over them. She admits with discomfort, “So I take phosphates or phosphites-whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and airs, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again”(Gilman 956). Although she would know if she was sick and what would make her feel better than anyone else, she is forced to go along with her husband’s elaborate plan for her path to recovery.
In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot’s interpretation of the HeLa phenomenon gave the readers a glimpse into her opinion of biomedical research during Henrietta’s time. The great leaps in scientific research caused many scientists to become excited for what was to come. However, this excitement caused Henrietta’s doctors—and many others— to neglect their patients’ rights. Namely, many patients, including Henrietta, were oblivious to what the doctors were actually doing to them. Consequently, the doctors held all the power in their relationship with their patients. Skloot’s depictions of Henrietta and Moore’s battles show the readers the harm that was done due to this power. By and large, Skloot’s portrayal of the biomedical field is dim, but has promise for the future. And this promise for the future can only come from more pro-patient regulations.
Frances Burney started feeling pain in her breast in 1810, and in September 1811 a mastectomy was performed to her. In her letter ”A Mastectomy” she describes the illness and the operation, her feelings and fears, to her sister Esther Burney. The letter tells a story of a battle of control and against the feeling of powerlessness. It also speaks of empowerment; writing is Burney's way of regaining control over her operation and making it part of her own history. In this paper I attempt to find and analyse the reasons for Burney's feeling of powerlessness, its describtion in the letter, and the ways she tries to fight it.
Misogyny in this text is represented through many factors showing how women can only prove their dominance by removing the men’s sexuality and freedom of independence. It is also represented in the fact that Nurse Ratched is seen as perfect except for her breasts, her outward mark of being a woman. “A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it.” (6) The fear of women is usually stemmed from ...
I have chosen to write about Virginia Woolf, a British novelist who wrote A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, to name a few of her pieces of work. Virginia Woolf was my first introduction to feminist type books. I chose Woolf because she is a fantastic writer and one of my favorites as well. Her unique style of writing, which came to be known as stream-of-consciousness, was influenced by the symptoms she experienced through her bipolar disorder. Many people have heard the word "bipolar," but do not realize its full implications. People who know someone with this disorder might understand their irregular behavior as a character flaw, not realizing that people with bipolar mental illness do not have control over their moods. Virginia Woolf’s illness was not understood in her lifetime. She committed suicide in 1941.
Wherein lies the odd attraction and power of the freakish? Just as often as it introduces us to expressions of common human experience, study in the Humanities also introduces us to the decidedly uncommon--to writers, artists and thinkers who push conventional limits of language and narrative, vision and imagination, memory and history, or logic and rationality. For our Freaks of the Core colloquium, we explored the outer limits of human expression and experience. What, we asked, defines the abnormal or the outlandish? the fanatical or heretical? the illusory or the grotesque? Why are we commonly drawn to the very uncommon? "Nothing, indeed, is more revolting," wrote Thomas De Quincey in his famously freaky Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, "than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that 'decent drapery' which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them" (1).[1] But De Quincey chose to tear away that drapery in his Confessions nevertheless, believing that his outlandish experiences with addiction, poverty and illusion would teach his readers valuable lessons that outweighed any offense. "In that hope it is that I have drawn this up," wrote De Quincey, "and that must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honorable reserve, which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own infirmities" (1). The essays below also tear away the "decent drapery" which covers the sometimes unsightly extremes of human experience, and they do so with similar hopes and reasons.
Allusions to illness and disease weave into every scene of the play, and can be found referenced
While Charon whole-heartedly endorses Narrative Medicine, and narrative knowledge as the means to radical change of the practice of medicine, Garden takes a few steps back to objectively assess the issue. Garden goes all the way back to the eighteenth century to
In the book, “The Catcher in The Rye” by J.D. Salinger, the main character is very strange in numerous ways. His name is Holden Caulfield and boy has he got something wrong with him. He rambles on and on about nonsense for the first 20-something chapters of the book. He only likes 3-4 people in the book. He smokes and drinks heavily at the ripe age of seventeen. He has been expelled out of numerous prep schools, and feels abandoned and not wanted. He has some sort of mental illness and I think I know what it is. I believe that Holden Caulfield has a mental illness known as Borderline Personality Disorder, also known as BPD. The reasoning for my thinking is that Holden’s actions match up with the symptoms of this illness and the isolation he
Hutchinson, Tom “Illness and the hero’s journey: still ourselves and more”, CMAJ. 162.11 (2000):p.1597 web (date accessed).
... that it combined the perfect amount of medical history, scientific fact and storytelling; creating a brilliant account that kept me wanting to find out more. It was full of interesting information that helped me to understand more about the cholera epidemic and the views of public health and medical practice of the people in 1854 London.
The creation of a stressful psychological state of mind is prevalent in the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Ophelia’s struggles in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, and the self-inflicted sickness seen in William Blake’s “Mad Song”. All the characters, in these stories and poems, are subjected to external forces that plant the seed of irrationality into their minds; thus, creating an adverse intellectual reaction, that from an outsider’s point of view, could be misconstrued as being in an altered state due to the introduction of a drug, prescribed or otherwise, furthering the percep...
From the beginning of the play, Shakespeare characterizes Macbeth to be a figure of power by things such as the defeat of the unloyal thane, and the gain of his title. Though Macbeth appears to represent an idea of power, Macbeth is proven to be a false aid to this perceived symbol of power through the witches involvement, animal nature controlling human nature, man being susceptible to temptation, all climaxing in Macbeth being a powerless, ineffective king. By examining Shakespeare’s imagery of illness, one can determine that Macbeth is a powerless figure that leads him to be an ineffective king.
7. Mullen, Paul E. “Violently Ill.” AQ: Australian Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 2, 1998, pp. 30–32. JSTOR, JSTOR,
Sometimes trying to conform to society’s expectations becomes extremely overwhelming, especially if you’re a woman. Not until recent years have woman become much more independent and to some extent equalized to men. However going back to the 19th century, women were much more restrained. From the beginning we perceive the narrator as an imaginative woman, in tune with her surroundings. The narrator is undoubtedly a very intellectual woman. Conversely, she lives in a society which views women who demonstrate intellectual potential as eccentric, strange, or as in this situation, ill. She is made to believe by her husband and physician that she has “temporary nervous depression --a slight hysterical tendency” and should restrain herself from any intellectual exercises in order to get well (Gilman 487). The narrator was not allowed to write or in any way freely...