Narrating the Body: Disease as Interpersonal Event

Abstract

The writing of disease has a particular resonance for literary studies. What we generally think of as 'histories of disease' are written by scholars: medical historians, medical sociologists and historians of science. There is also, however, a body of writing which presents a different sort of history and phenomenology of disease, and can provide a sort of counterpoint to academic accounts of disease. In this paper, I propose that biographical narratives of illness experiences, often called pathographies,1 have implicit in them an idea of the body which is fundamentally in conflict with the usual subject of biomedical history. The sick body represented in autobiography is alive, even if it is on the point of death, and this means that it has to be understood differently from the body of the anatomy lesson, what Drew Leder describes as 'the Cartesian Corpse' of Western biomedicine.2 A dead body is imagined as inert and stable, anatomically speaking.3 A living body is