Reviewed by: Treatments: Languages, Politics, and the Culture of Illness Kimberly R. Myers (bio) Lisa Diedrich. Treatments: Languages, Politics, and the Culture of Illness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 224 pp. Paperback, $22.50. When I was asked to review Lisa Diedrich’s Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness, I was delighted. I had just reviewed an essay by Diedrich for another journal for which I am co-guest editor, and that shorter work was brilliant. The scope of her new book is ambitious indeed—“This is a book about bodies, language, and death; it is about illness, culture, and politics, and the discourses and practices of medicine, literature, and philosophy” (Diedrich vii)—and such a wideranging study provides Diedrich an excellent opportunity to showcase her extensive reading and ample intelligence. To investigate how illness narratives from the mid-twentieth century through the present function “personally, politically, and culturally” (xvii), Diedrich examines memoirs from well-known and often-cited writers, including Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Oliver Sacks, Abraham Verghese, Raphael Campo, and Atul Gawande; and she also brings to light some texts that many readers of Literature and Medicine might not know. In her Introduction, Diedrich says that she hopes to communicate her ideas to a diverse audience, including scholars in literature, philosophy, cultural studies, political science, medicine, “medical humanities, science studies, and disability studies,” as well as “a more general audience” (viii). She undermines this admirably democratic impulse, however, by choosing the highly intricate “theoretical frames [of] poststructuralism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis . . . [that she links] under the more expansive and interdisciplinary rubric of feminist theory” (ix). The result of this choice is that Diedrich devotes an inordinate amount of space in each chapter to establishing the tenets of whichever theory she needs for the texts under consideration—the effect of which is that the theoretical texts become, in many ways, primary, leaving too little room for the treatment of actual illness narratives, presumably the original appeal of her book. Moreover, Diedrich layers theory upon theory, which serves not to illuminate but to obscure her analyses, at least in such a relatively short book of roughly 200 pages. One of the most interesting and helpful parts of Treatments is Diedrich’s apology for memoir as valid art form and cultural document. She rejects “[t]he main argument against memoirs”: that “all memoirs are nothing more than a self-indulgent mining of personal experience for more and more extreme events that the author hopes will engender sympathy, disgust, or both from his or her readers” (xiv). Rather than view memoir as “victim art,” Diedrich asserts that “to judge a memoir [End Page 430] is not to judge a life but to judge a representation, which is always partial and contingent, and determined as much by the reader and what she brings to the text as by the author” (xvii). I found this assertion one of the most gratifying of the entire book, primarily, I think, because it opened up possibilities for creative reading and analysis instead of focusing on the limitations and failures of language. By far, the greatest strength of this book is Diedrich’s examination of individual illness narratives. When she is finally able to focus on the memoirs in each chapter, she becomes less self-consciously theoretical and offers genuinely thought-provoking insights; at this point, theory becomes a useful tool instead of an end in itself. Chapter One, for example, provides a compelling look at “which particular stories of illness can be told and who gets to tell them” (7). Diedrich uses conventional literary analysis to highlight how two women process in language their “incarceration” in tuberculosis sanatoria—Betty MacDonald’s The Plague and I with humor and in her own voice, and Madonna Swan’s oral history, Madonna Swan: A Lakota Woman’s Story, in somber tones, as told by a third party. Diedrich provides valuable details here, in particular: about tuberculosis in the Native American population, about how illness can be viewed as “experience” and as “event,” and about the importance of “health capital,” by which she means access to a range of resources—material, institutional, social, and cultural—that...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Dec 13, 2023
Katie M. Edwards + 9
Open Access