Medical eros: caregivers, loss, and an ethics of waiting.

Abstract

This hybrid personal essay and scholarly article explores what, from a strictly medical point of view, is an unreasonable and entirely counter-intuitive position: that doctors and patients might do well to consider and even embrace the role of eros. Eros can stand as the classical name for the shape-shifting sensuous and passionate libidinal forces that continue to sweep through human life, from cradle to grave, and that find multiple places both in the experience of illness and in the practice of medicine. The essay begins with the description of a personal encounter with Alzheimer’s Disease and moves to general accounts of the role of caregivers, the “erotic economy” of illness, and—in the face of extreme loss--an ethics of waiting. It builds upon the author’s previous work on eros and illness, in particular “Un-Forgetting Asclepius: An Erotics of Illness” ( New Literary History 38, no. 3 [2007]: 419–41).