Sick Body Research Articles

Approach to death in the Obstetric-Gynaecological Institute of Milan at the beginning of the 20th Century. Reflections on the doctor’s care in accompanying human dying

This work aims to examine the approach to death in the Obstetric-Gynaecological Institute of Milan at the beginning of the 20th century, through an analysis of the medical records of women who died there during their hospitalisation. These documentary sources offer a picture of how death was experienced, assisted and accompanied during this time period. Doctors of the time were committed not only to treating the sick body, but also to offering emotional and empathic assistance to the suffering and dying person. Despite their limited tools and the scarcity of effective therapeutic treatments, these doctors, through their presence, sought to alleviate suffering and safeguard the dignity of the dying. The women who turned to the Obstetric-Gynaecological Institute of Milan for treatment were faced with complex pathologies that, often, required difficult surgical procedures. The post-operative course of these procedures was often characterized by severe complications, and those of an infectious nature proved to be the most complex to manage. The historical analysis of these medical records offers a lesson for contemporary medicine, highlighting the importance of keeping the focus on the person, even before treatment of the disease, because the care and accompaniment of the suffering and dying cannot be overlooked. Rediscovering the history of medicine and its roots allows us to restore the sense of humanity to care and to face illness and death with compassion and empathy, allowing the echo of the doctors who preceded us to resonate in our steps.

„Dzisiaj wymiotowałam po raz ostatni”. Zaburzenia odżywiania w Sobibor Jeana Molli

This article discusses the problem of eating disorders in Sobibor, a Young Adult novel by the French writer Jean Molla in the light of illness narrative studies, the sick body aesthetics and physical sickness. The article goes over the narrator’s list of possible causes of her psychosomatic condition, i.e. family tensions, social pressure to conform to the prevailing beauty canon, and her own rebellion against the female identity. Emily’s narration combines two strands, a struggle with adolescent personal problems and the discovery of a nasty family secret. An analysis of her experiences and reflections reveals the connections between the anorexia/bulimia syndrome and the effects of a generational trauma. Her condition is complicated further by the revelation of her late grandfather’s Nazi past, an exemplary case of post-memory trauma. The article suggests that her anorexic vomiting is a an iconic gesture corresponding to the writing (i.e. getting something off one’s chest) of the story of her traumas (both her own and inherited from an earlier generation).

A Woman’s Body in the Novel the Bridge by Writer Jasmina Musabegović

The subject of research and analysis in this paper is how the female body was represented in the novel The Bridge written by Jasmina Musabegović. The novel The Bridge was published in 1994. and represents a kind of sequel to the novel Switches from 1986 and a connection with the novel Women. The voice from 2005. Metaphorically and literally this novel represents the connection between the two novels, in fact, a transitional narrative about the maturation and growing up of the main protagonist who, during her stay in a sanatorium, realizes changes in her own body and enters puberty and becomes the body of a women. At the same time, there is a process of identification with the mother and other women who play an important role in the life of the storyteller and who represent a connection during transitions from one stage of life to another. The body as a place in on which meanings are inscribed, becomes the reason for external and internal changes through which the girl who narrates experiences. Because of the sick body, she went to the sanatorium, the biological maturation of the body causes understanding and identification with the mother and sisters, only to remember performative repetition and observation of movements towards and over the bridge, rhythmic combing, and similar body repetitive gestures felt a closeness, understanding, and existence of transgenerational patterns that are transmitted along the female line in the family. This paper brings an analysis and interpretation of those elements in which the female body is represented as one of the primary determinants for self-identification and gender belonging. The theoretical starting point for the analyses of various aspects of the body in this novel is contemporary feminist research based on Elizabeth Grosz's study Volatile Bodies. Special attention will be paid to how a particular image of the human body is formed, as well as the factors that have a direct impact on it.

Broken Bodies, Fractured Places

What happens when a place writes itself into our bodies, and when broken bodies write from fractured places? I have been immersed in a sick body after being born into the “kingdom of the sick” (Sontag 2013, p.1) when I was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis at nine weeks of age. Consequently, I have spent a substantial amount of time in hospital—a place we go to ‘get better’. My hospital bed is a place I have always written—often with friends dying around me and in the face of immense physical and existential suffering. Being creative in an institutionalised setting has allowed me to resist the feeling of confinement, where I’m able to establish routine and agency to try and create some order among the disorder. The concept of place became especially significant when I was placed in isolation due to being immunosuppressed following a double lung transplant in 1998. The landscape changed from one of community to one that was more solitary and dystopian. A liminality of place exists between home and hospital, and this creative work contemplates how a multidimensionality of creativity can exist, and indeed thrive, within an institutionalised setting.

The Sick Body Writing: Towards an Affective Genetic Criticism

The Sick Body Writing: Towards an Affective Genetic Criticism examines the idea that manuscripts can be affected by illness as much as their authors’ bodies are. This article aims to highlight a critical gap in the methodology of literary genetic criticism by introducing a new lens of affective genetic criticism. Genetic criticism looks at the archive of drafts and notes related to a literary work-in-progress. The application of affect theory brings focus to the impacts of the author’s bodily experience during writing while in different states of un/healthiness. The effects of authors’ health on their writing, especially textual non/production and the representations of un/healthiness, can be found in their archive in a variety of forms, whether represented in the narrative or responsible for elements of the narrative’s structure. Using two case studies from different literary canons, James Joyce (modernist) and Aidan Chambers (children’s and Young Adult), the article concludes that this lens can be productively applied to understand better the embodiment of writing processes and adaptations of writing environments as a result of affective needs.

Doświadczenie (chorego) ciała w poezji Haliny Poświatowskiej. Perspektywa somatopoetyki

This is an analysis of some selected poems by Halina Poświatowska using the ap-proach and conceptual tools of somapoetics. The discussion focuses in turn on the manifestations of the (sick) body in Poświatowska’s poems and poetic prose (especially when its connected with special sound effects), the verbalization of sensory experience (primarily with regard to the sense of touch) and the role of the sick woman’s body in her poetic world (including direct references to the sick body in the act of writing). The critical strategy employed in this article is intended to complement the legacy readings of Poświatowska’s work with a functional, somapoetic interpretation that would give full scope to her narrative of the ailing body.

Body, mind and culture : The complex dimensions of experiencing pain

This article deals with the interrelationship between body, mind and culture with respect to being healthy and being ill. If one wants to treat not only sickness but also sick people, it is helpful to be aware not only of the somatic and psychological dimensions of adisease but also of the "cultural" dimension of a disease. Based on personal reflections and supplemented by afocused literature search this article provides insights into how cultural influences not only affect the experience of illness but also decide how an illness is dealt with individually and socially. Furthermore, it is shown that not only being sick but also the sick body can be understood in somatic, psychological and cultural dimensions and that adistinction must be made between the body as it physically is and as it is subjectively perceived. Finally, an insight into the complexity of the somatopsychic and psychosomatic interactions is provided in order to derivatively show how mental stress can lead to physical pain and physical pain can become amental stressor.

The Symbiosis of Language(s), Literature, and the Medical Humanities

This Special Collection focuses on the ‘pathological body’ in literature, from the socio-cultural anxieties around the human body to the sick body’s relationship with language(s) and translation. The six articles—from Italian, German, Spanish, French literatures—explore posthuman female body-subjectivity; catalepsy as a framework to reorient traditional gender narratives; the violence of maintaining a socially acceptable subjecthood; the body as language in creating identity; the emotional-psychological coupled with the environment; and translation as an epistemic category. The concept of the ‘pathological body’ arose from the professionalisation of European medicine from the mid-1800s, and literary texts and medical theories travelled across national boundaries in a mutually reinforcing interconnection that globally positioned bourgeois masculinity at the top of a medical-humanistic hierarchy. This Introduction calls for the collaboration of European Modern Languages scholars to begin undoing the consequent harmful models. Understanding that medical paradigms are formed through credible stories, the first section highlights literature as an activist (Thornber, 2013) and ethical site of knowledge that can deconstruct an apparently immutable medical narrative. Section II gives an historical overview of the rise of clinical medicine and its creation of the idealised man and woman, and examines the repercussions of not fulfilling these normative categories. Section III discusses the overlap of nineteenth-century scientific and literary texts, and the danger of translating ‘sickly’ texts. Section IV notes the signal importance of language and considers how non-normative and racialised identities can ‘write back’ against medical paradigms. Banner image: Max Simon Nordau, Entartung, Vol. 2, p. 401. 1893 edition. Berlin: C. Duncker. Image taken from Google Books.

DETERMINATION OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS' METAPHORICAL PERCEPTIONS ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF CLIMATE CHANGE

<p>This study aims to reveal the metaphor that Turkish university students have about the concept of "climate change". The research was carried out with the students at Necmettin Erbakan University, Ahmet Keleşoğlu Faculty of Education (Geography 17, Biology 26, History 47) and Faculty of Health Sciences (Nutrition and Dietetics Department 74) in the spring term of 2021-2022 academic year. The research group consisted of a total of 164 students (124 female, 40 male). The data of the research were collected by qualitative research method and the research was organized in a phenomenological design. To determine the perceptions of the students about the concept of climate change, a semi-structured form containing the expression "climate change is like............because........." was prepared and the students were asked to complete the sentence given in the form. The data obtained were subjected to content analysis. Tables were created by calculating the number of metaphors in each category, how many students repeated the metaphor (frequency), and percentage values. When the findings of the research are evaluated, it is seen that a total of 96 valid metaphors were produced by the students. These metaphors were coded by considering their common features and 8 different conceptual categories were formed. Some of these categories are <em>"Climate change leading to uncertainty", </em>"<em>Climate change as a symptom of danger/worry", </em>"<em>Climate change as the beginning of change</em>", "<em>Climate change as the</em> <em>work of insensitivity", "Climate change as a factor forcing to get used to the new situation", "Climate change with a disruptive effect", "Climate change as a cause of despair", "Climate change as a source of different thoughts", </em>and the<em> </em>number of metaphor and frequencies of these categories are calculated and given in tables. When the findings obtained are analyzed, it is seen that the most recurrent metaphor for climate change includes concepts such as <em>human (f=5), mental state (f=4), life (f=3), a sick body (f=3), disappointment (f=3), cancer (f=3), extinction (f=4), moving (f=4), disaster (f=3), end of the world (f=3), and chaos (f=2). </em>When the metaphor produced by the students in this study are analyzed, it is seen that the perceptions of university students about the concept of climate change are diverse and rich.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0660/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

노년의 시간성과 자긍심의 정치적 가능성

This article sheds light on the marginalization of elderly characters in Wan-Seo Park's novels about old age, a phenomenon attributed to their illness and disability. The elderly characters find themselves ensnared in the normative time path, helplessly subjected to the violence of preemptive attack and alienation imposed upon them. On the other hand, some people recognize aging as a disease and disability and even embrace their identity as a person with a disability. This article analyzes the intersectionality of aging and disability and explore the potential for resistance among those who confront discriminatory violence through temporal and affective lenses.
 In 「Twilight」, an elderly character is referred to as “old man” in a preemptive manner that compels them to acknowledge his shameful existence. Through this, it was affirmed that life in old age is governed by the impact of existential power, which preemptively controls and manages society and culture as a whole. In contrast, the characters in 「Reunion of Evening」 and 「The Twilight at Dusk」 derive the strength to embrace themselves by means of positivity and pride in their own bodies. This study has found that the affirmation of the ‘sick body’ and appropriation of the sense of heterogeneity or queerness within the community can be a means of resisting the violence of healing.
 Wan-Seo Park's novel about aging attempts to challenge the dominant system that excludes the sick elderly body by redefining the female body. Moreover, the suggestion is put forth that when the elderly body is acknowledged as an entity with its own temporality, the perception of disability identity in old age can undergo a transformation.

A hermeneutic phenomenological study on the disease experience among young women with breast cancer

ObjectiveWomen diagnosed with breast cancer under the age of 40 face distinctive physical and psychosocial challenges resulting from the disease's pathological features and the developmental aspects associated with their youth. This study aims to investigate the lived experience of breast cancer among this group of young women. MethodsParticipants were purposefully selected from online communities and chat rooms in South Korea. A total of 15 young women with breast cancer were included in this study, and data were gathered through three focus group interviews. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using the hermeneutic phenomenology method. ResultsFour essential themes emerged based on four lifeworld existentials: lived body, lived time, lived space, and lived others. These four essential themes were: a wounded and sick body, life robbed of youth and elderly years, crossroads of growth discovered at life's extremes, and a steadfast companion on a solitary journey. ConclusionsYoung women with breast cancer face unique challenges due to the intersection of a severe illness and its impact during their formative years. This study offers valuable insights for crafting customized interventions that directly target the physical and psychosocial requirements of young breast cancer survivors, ultimately enhancing their quality of life.

Rewriting the Economic Growth History of Korea in the 1970s: Focusing on the Pollution Imports and the Shadow People of Economic Growth

During the period of rapid economic growth since the 1970s, Korea imported many polluting industrial facilities from Japan, resulting in the generation of huge amounts of hazardous waste. While the problems of environmental degradation such as these were an integral part of Korea’s development process, they have received only scant attention in the official history of the country’s economic development, often being dismissed as peripheral issues. This paper aims to go beyond this tendency by rewriting the history of economic growth that underlay the disputes caused by the importation of polluting industries from Japan in the 1970s. Its features can be summarized as follows.</br>First, Japan was the most damaging pollution exporter to Korea in the 1970s, and it was also the direct channel to import the knowledge of pollution, and alternative logic against the pollution issues.</br>Second, discussions over industrial pollution in the 1970s occurred in the antagonistic relationship between four groups: the government, media, opposition party, and scholars.</br>Third, a group of experts played various roles, including bureaucrats, researchers, and policy makers, leading the discussion of pollution in Korean society in the 1970s.</br>It has been well over 50 years since 1970. Nevertheless, Korean society still does not hesitate to create areas and people that become shadows in the wake of development. This explains why we should focus on the “sick body” rather than the “numbers” in this age of science and technology.

Discourse of disease in Lesia Ukrainka’s epistolary

The article deals with peculiarities of a writer’s experience of long-term illness, the influence of the disease on rhythm, lifestyle and creativity, based on Lesia Ukrainka’s letters of 1883-1913 to relatives, friends, acquaintances, artists, and public figures. It is found out that the internal picture of the disease has been reflected in the letters with the help of the system of writer’s diverse experience, feelings, and emotions. According to the epistolary, Lesia Ukrainka perceived the disease as a yoke, captivity, which prevented her from being proactive, from taking an active part in cultural, artistic, publishing and translation activities. At the same time, the disease built up a discipline, purposefulness of the writer, who worked hard at her educational and intellectual level, in such way cognized her capabilities, outlining the prospects of creativity. The article reveals peculiarities of the disease, changes in the writer’s well-being, focuses on creativity as an active resistance to the disease, as a way of achieving self-esteem. The culture of work and rest, attention to the sick body, her scrupulosity in the performance of medical procedures contributed to the creation of acceptable conditions for creative work, which performed a therapeutic function in the life of the writer.

“The sick body has its own narrative impulse”: contemporary Irish illness narratives and institutions of care

“The sick body has its own narrative impulse”: contemporary Irish illness narratives and institutions of care

Écrire pour guérir. Les formules magiques écrites dans la médecine populaire roumaine (XVIIe-XXe siècles)

In traditional Romanian society, where the vast majority of the population was illiterate, writing remained mysterious and inaccessible. For the peasants from the Romanian village, writing and the book have acquired separate meanings, being used in a particular way through magico-religious rituals. In order to defend against the action of evil forces and for the healing of the sick body, the traditional community instituted ceremonial, apotropaic and thaumaturgical practices, involving a set of alternative uses of writing. The clerics played an important role in consolidating these practices. The village priests made the written amulets (apocryphal texts, prayers and incantations) intended to be worn closest to the body to ward off unclean spirits which could cause harm to women who had just given birth and to the new-born. Books and writing were seen as repositories of healing forces that could ward off disease and trouble. In the Romanian rural society, between the two World Wars, it was still believed that evil spirits, agents of disease, could be drawn from the sick person's body with the help of “healing letters” (rom. “răvașe de leac”), containing prayers, various religious symbols, names of saints but also magic formulas, often presented in an enigmatic and incomprehensible way. The formulas are written upside down, from right to left, then from left to right (like the famous palindrome “Sator arepo tenet opera rotas” or “Abracadabra”) or distributed in geometric figures (spirals, triangles, crosses). These “healing papers”, with a strong iconic charge, were applied to the body or the text and the image were drawn directly on the skin of the sufferer. Drinking water in which one had washed a plate on the surface of which healing formulas had been written or swallowing the paper on which magic formulas were written were other common practices. Romanian ethnologists have documented the survival of these practices until the mid1970s. Similar practices are found in other parts of Europe.

‘아픈 몸’과 계급 - 식민지기 프롤레타리아 소설의 질병과 장애 재현

식민지시기 프롤레타리아 소설에서 재현되는 ‘아픈 몸’은 운명적인 것으로 치부되거나 치유 · 치료의 영역으로 간주되지 않는다. 프로소설은 질병과 장애를 계급과 교차하여 재현하면서 그것을 사회적인 것으로 사유할 수 있게 했다는 점에서 주목을 요한다. 이때의 질병과 장애는 은유라기보다는 그것으로 인해 고통받는 현실 그 자체이며, 사회구조적 차별과 억압으로 만들어지는 것이다. 이들 소설은 ‘아픈 몸’을 현실적으로 드러내 보여 주면서 ‘건강한 몸’으로 발현되는 ‘정상성’의 폭력을 고발하고 그것에 균열을 가한다. 이때의 정상성은 제국주의와 자본주의가 만들어 내는 질서를 포괄한다. 이런 지점을 염두에 주면서, 본고에서는 질병과 장애를 재현하는 프로소설의 두 양상을 살핀다. 하나는 억압과 착취가 새겨지는 ‘아픈 몸’에 대한 인식을 드러내는 소설들이고, 또 다른 하나는 ‘아픈 몸’을 통해 존재와 연대를 이끌어내는 것을 보여주는 소설들이다. 요컨대 프로소설에서 재현되는 질병과 장애는 극복되어야 하는 대상으로 여겨진다기보다는, 아픈 존재가 놓인 사회적 조건을 드러내 보여주고, 오히려 고통을 통해 주변적 존재들을 연결한다는 점에서 정치적 의미를 가진다.

Features of the methods of conduct of physical education classes in special medical groups for diseases of the cardiovascular system

The theoretical justification of the importance of the methodology of conducting physical education classes in special medical groups for diseases of the cardiovascular system is provided. With the aim of a differentiated approach to the organization of physical culture classes, it was explained that all students of higher education institutions are divided into three medical groups according to their level of health and physical fitness – basic, preparatory and special medical. The special medical group has two levels of complexity – A and B. Based on the research, a methodology for conducting physical education classes in special medical groups for diseases of the cardiovascular system was developed and proposed. A list of non-recommended exercises for students with cardiovascular diseases in physical education classes in special medical groups is provided. At present, given the importance of this topic, there is an insufficient amount of research in the field of the method of applying therapeutic exercises during physical education classes in diseases of the cardiovascular system. The method of conducting physical education classes at the SMG for diseases of the cardiovascular system is an important component of improving the functional state of the sick student's body. Therapeutic exercises are used in various forms for all diseases of the cardiovascular system. They have a positive effect on the functions of the heart and blood vessels, their morphology. The level of theoretical and practical training of physical education teachers and the level of motivation of students with cardiovascular diseases are also important when working in special medical groups.

КОНЦЕПТ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОГО ТЕЛА ВО ФРАНЦУЗСКОМ ПОЛИТИКО-ФИЛОСОФСКОМ ДИСКУРСЕ XIV В.

Throughout the 14th – 15th centuries, French intellectuals actively used the concept of body politic in their works – in mirrors for princes, sermons, ballads and first political treatises. In this vein, both ancient examples of the construction of such models and medieval works were subjected to rethinking. The metaphor of the body politic became a constant leitmotif of the 14th century mirrors for princes, who with the help of that trope tried to explain the complex social structure and reflect on the abstract nature of the state. While in them the political body often served as an ideal, a model of correct state structure, the antipode became the image of a sick or monstrous body. Eustache Deschamps refers to such an image in his ballads, using it to demonstrate the deplorable state of the French kingdom, mired in feuds and the hardships of war with England. The metaphor of the political body was interpreted in a variety of ways: it was a concept designed to consolidate opposing social groups and political factions around the figure of the monarch, but at the same time it could be used to criticize the corruption of the ruler’s close associates. Such different strategies of interpretation of that concept compel to further analyze the genesis and development of metaphorical descriptions of the state.

Diagnosis and Repair: Reading the Sick Body with Chaucer's Physician and Pardoner

Abstract: This paper theorizes fourteenth-century English metaphors of reading as a medical process, arguing that Canterbury Tales Block C showcases the interplay of the Physician's and Pardoner's two distinct medicalized hermeneutics. Turning to the queer disability politics of Eli Clare and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to unpack the ethical import of such metaphors of reading and repair, I argue that these two tales proffer first the Physician's systematized interpretive strategy of diagnosis and cure before turning to the immoral, anti-cure processes of interpretation offered by the Pardoner. Chaucer's Physician is widely acknowledged as an inadequate reader who fails to account for nuanced spiritual meaning in both his literary and medical practice. I argue that the Physician and his tale reveal the failures of interpretation that reads for harm's "roote" and "boote" ( GP , 424–25), and, further, reveal the violence of authoritative cure applied without consent. In this paper's sick/queer lens, then, the Pardoner and his invitation to informed and consensual comfort become a response to such reading methods that seek to organize, cure, and adhere to coherent systems of meaning. Further, nuancing our current understanding of queer reparative practices in the context of chronic illness, the Pardoner's methods showcase the impossibility, at times undesirability, of interpretive repair that pursues wholeness. Refusing medical and spiritual intervention, the Pardoner comes to offer a participatory hermeneutic that prioritizes comfort over wholeness, and a model of care based not on authoritative cure but on iterative consent.

Anticipating Illness: The Illusion of Health in Knock ou Le Triomphe de la Médicine

Abstract: Knock ou Le Triomphe de la Médicine [ Knock, or the Triumph of Medicine ] (1923) is a satirical play by Jules Romains parodying the hierarchical power relationship between patient and doctor and the supposed infallibility of science in the early twentieth century. Drawing on the phenomenological work of German physician Herbert Plügge (1970), I argue that the play exploits the physical interconnections between the healthy body and the sick body to present health as a deceptive state of hidden or imminent illness. By anticipating illness, the play shatters the illusion of health in ways that are ethically, psychosocially, and biomedically salient.