Literature and Medicine 2000-2007.

Abstract

Literature and Medicine 2000–2007 Maura Spiegel (bio) and Rita Charon (bio) Our co-editorial retrospect on Literature and Medicine from 2000 to 2007 exposes major conceptual and disciplinary breakthroughs that, at the time, were of course invisible. We can see now how significant a role L&M played in the emergence and development of the genre of illness narratives, which by 2022 has emerged as one of the towering developments not only in literature and medicine but in the humanities and the public discourse altogether. After publishing her 1993 authoritative Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins became an L&M Associate Editor in 1996. Anne characterized what she termed "pathography" as survival stories or modern adventure stories and, perhaps more tellingly, as "cautionary parables," striking the parallel to conversion narratives in which life undergoes a total bouleversement to become something else entirely.1 As Guest Editor of our Spring 2002 Special Issue on "Literature, Medicine, and Children," Anne devoted a section to "Personal Narrative," written by several parents about their acutely or chronically ill or disabled children. In "Research Shows: A Narrative of Teaching and Learning," English professor Deborah Minter provided pages from her journal during her baby's treatment for an aggressive leukemia. She counterposed dramatic scenes from visits to the pediatric oncologist, support groups with other mothers of severely ill children, and classroom discussions in her ironically timed college seminar on "Stories and Human Experience." Throughout, the reader sees the narrator relying on her own intellectuality as a ploy to get one step removed from what she is actually going through. Her artist husband Dale contributes a series of photographic collages that juxtapose teddy bears with IV drips and a rocking horse with an intubated baby, with one unbearable shot of a doll's head enshrouded in a plastic bag. Literary scholars Joanne Trautmann Banks and Michael Bérubé, well known to L&M (Banks wrote the first essay in the first issue of [End Page 213] our journal in 1982), themselves had severely ill or neuroatypical children. Banks's son Piers suffered irreversible neurological damage as an infant from uncontrolled seizures. Bérubé's son Jamie was born with Down's Syndrome. The parents' comments widen the picture toward both the existential and the surreal, exposing the "comedy, tragedy, and higher comedy" (Jo's words) of parenting ill children while nailing the personal confrontations with embodiment and mortality that had been theirs every day.2 Jo narrates days in Piers's life in his residential school for developmentally challenged children and adults, in effect donating the protagonist position to the child. Darker, Michael's account probes the ironies and pathos in the family's situation with a physically healthy, rambunctious child whose thoughts and actions travel uncommon paths. Michael repeats the words "solace," "consolation," or "inconsolable" six times in his five-and-a-half page essay, "Life Stories: In Response to Deborah Minter." Consolation is sought by both the child and his parents. Disrupting this otherwise rather snarky representation of the endlessness of a family's situation with a child requiring above-average attention, the idea of consolation recalls Anne Hawkins's sense of pathography as a religious genre. What seemed at the time an odd pleat in the mood of Michael's essay became telling upon reading Michael Rowe's essay "Metamorphosis: Defending the Human" (Fall 2002), which indirectly takes up the notion of consolation. A Yale sociologist of poverty and urban health and author of Crossing the Border: Encounters between Homeless People and Outreach Workers (1999), Rowe seems particularly well qualified to write a personal essay about illness narratives. He lived through the long illness and death of his teen-aged son after a second failed liver transplant. Rowe paid me [Rita] a visit some time after the events recounted in his paper. This young father joined me in my office, exuding urgent, charged affect, sitting on the edge of his seat, leaning forward as if to extinguish the distance between us, asking without words, "Why did he die? Why is he gone? It cannot be that he is dead." Although the essay provides an elegant analysis of Kafka's "Metamorphosis," it...