Literature and Medicine

Medical error can be a devastating experience for medical practitioners who are often called the "second victims" of medical mistakes. The emotional toll medical error takes on doctors is not well understood, with few studies investigating shame and/or guilt in response to making mistakes. This essay considers how fiction and medical nonfiction might contribute to this understanding, by exploring the relation between shame, guilt, and medical error in Ann Patchett's novel State of Wonder (2011) alongside Danielle Ofri's autobiographical reflections in her essay, "Ashamed to Admit It: Owning up to Medical Error," later reprinted as part of a chapter entitled "Burning with Shame" in What Doctors Feel (2013)...

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Bram Stoker's Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles all paint a picture of primeval hunger. But the satiation of this hunger sustains an undead, monstrous existence. Essentially an animated corpse, the vampire embodies what Julia Kristeva has described de facto as waste. The image of the vampire perverts everything that is sacred: signficantly, it reverses the ritual of the Eucharist. Yet in doing so, it fosters an uncanny exploration of theological hunger at the heart of bodily waste...

This essay examines the challenge of breastfeeding in Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, specifically how the process of learning to feed, significant in both her own and her mother's traumatic entrances into motherhood, enables Bui to face the "terrifying thought" that, upon giving birth, "FAMILY is now something [she has] created." By situating her narrative in the context of feeding her son, Bui amplifies the associations between the act of providing nourishment and the matrilineal responsibility of satiating a hunger for familial connection...

During the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis and their allies between 1941 and 1944 (one of the most deadliest events of World War II), famine caused hundreds of thousands of deaths among the civilian population. How did people react to malnourishment and its impact on the body and mind? The diaries kept by hundreds of ordinary men and women provide an insight into the intimate perception of the famine as these events were unfolding. While the extent of food deprivation is heavily downplayed (even concealed) in Soviet propaganda, it is absolutely central in the diaries...

The importance of authorial intention has been debated extensively in literary studies. In cognitive literary studies, however, the effects books provoke in readers are of greater relevance. With an unreliable intradiegetic narrator, ambivalent about her denial of hunger, Wintergirls (2009), a US YA anorexia novel, embodies the spiraling network of lies that feeds this condition. This essay takes Wintergirls as a starting point to discuss the therapeutic or harmful effects of literature, over and above the intentions of the writer...

In this essay, I outline the colonial origins of the prevailing beliefs and attitudes towards fatness and current justifications for marginalizing fat bodies. I argue that, because the lineages of anti-fatness are beholden to the violence of colonialism and anti-Blackness, any theorization of fat that relies upon the pathological concept of "obesity" reinforces the imaginative purchase this history continues to exert within literary treatments of fat. As a remedy to this, I argue that Carmen Maria Machado's short story "Eight Bites" provides an alternate interpretive framework that invests in the capacity of a fat belly to nourish and even mother bodies as the organ that cares for those bodies the most...

What are the formal potentialities of illness narratives across media and writerly modes? And how can a formalist reading within this genre contribute to an understanding of particularly stigmatized illnesses and conditions? This essay considers Julia Lederer's and Carolyn Lazard's semi-autobiographical works on anorexia nervosa and chronic illness, respectively, and approaches them through the lens of Caroline Levine's new formalist method, which fuses the literary (or artistic more broadly) with the social and political...

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