Writing the Self in Illness- Reading the Experiential Through the Medical Memoir

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Writing the Self in Illness; Reading the Experiental Through the Medical Memoir is MUP's refreshing venture into the developing fields of Medical and Health Humanities with an aim to consider the necessity of the narrative knowledge as complementary to the contemporary notion of well-being, illness, and healthcare.

Is Individual happiness contingent on health ans well-being? How does one find happiness in the throes of illness? in the present-day scenario, wherein medical practice is largely dominated by evidence-based understanding, diagnostic language, and problem-solving method, the discipline of Medical Humanties emrgers with a reciporacal dialogue between Humanties, Social Science, health, and Medicine. < p> The Study of varied experitial narratives-literay works and unmeditated accounts of patients and healthcare professionals, is foregrounded in Medical Humanities to amlify knowledge and understanding about the complexity of encounters with illness and their transformational quality in a naunced manner. Both thought- provoking and informative, this publication brings about the anecdotal form of personal narratives in the light of medical discourses along with the specific cultural context of the narrative.

The Present publication seeks to be an important reading for students and academics in the field of medical humanities, health professionals or medical practitiners, as well as scholars aspiring to venture into this flourishing field.

Amala Poli is an international scholar with experience in intercultural teaching and research. Her scholarly interests and writing are situated in exploring the intersections between medicine and literature. She is currently pursuing her doctoral studies at Western University, Ontario, in the department of English and Writing Studies. Amala holds an MA in English Studies from the Manipal Centre for Humanities, MAHE, situated in Karnataka. She completed a language assistantship at the University of Castilla La- Mancha in 2017-18, teaching English at the university during this period. Having published academic essays in different research compilations, Amala is presently writing for Synapsis, an online health humanities journal based in Columbia University. Writing the Self in Illness: Reading the Experiential Through the Medical Memoir is her first book.

This book attempts to propose a new reading of the medical memoir, redefining it as any narrative of illness that questions and tefashions cultural discourses, ideas, and perceptions about health and illness. It proposes a new reading of such self-reflexive texts, taking into account medical memoits of literary merit from the 1980s to 2017.

We are at a juncture when the medical humanities are expanding beyond the field’s initial focus on the doctor-patient relationship to consider wider concerns in the domain of healthcare, medical practice, and knowledge production. The present effort of emerging research and theory is to find the balance between studying the individual encounters with the systemic enterprise and moving beyond a singular focus on cultural contexts. In an effort to find such a balance, the aim of this book is to consider the personal narrative in the light of the medical discourse as well as the cultural context of the text. Emphasis is laid on a method of reading and approaching the medical memoir, and this approach to reading medical memoirs is the contribution made by the book.

The contemporary medical memoir has insights that elucidate the ways in which our bodies accept the truths produced by scientific discourses, and these insights can fill the gaps in the existing knowledge systems, creating inroads into healthcare. These medical memoirs confound any neat categorizations and bifurcations, resisting external interpretations, and demand to be read on their own terms.

Short summaries of all the memoirs studied in this book are included at the end in an appendix. The summaries are meant to briefly orient the reader to the background of each key text and its author and to make the thematic analysis accessible to one unfamiliar with the texts.

I sat nervously at the edge of the chair in ber office. I had insagined this conversation so many times. Couldn't bring myself to do this earlier, didn't quite have the nerve. Yet, if there was anyone I would trust with a wellguarded secret, it wonld be ber. I said what I had to in a sentence or two, almost flippantly. So much for all the imagining and wondering. After all, illness is but a habit unless you experience its throes everyday, or unless it is an absolute stranger to you.

This was neither. It wasn’t mine to tell, and I didn’t care to know it any more closely than I already did.

My safe space. My person. She looked at me and said that people did think it could be genetic, and she said this with compassion, not too quackly and not sith too much emphasis.

The pause, barely a second or two, was an interminable lull in my bead. I rephed by telling ber how it hadn't skipped a generation for a whils now, and then hesitated. She knew my fear, I thought, in those few seconds. We move past this, we must not dwell on the unsaid.

She knew my unhealthy pride in a strong constitution, and bow I had worked to break my conceptions of health and iliness through courses and conversations.

I felt like the narrator in Em and the Big Hoom, who visits the fanriliar physician Jor answers and knows all along that waiting is the only way to tell.

I wondered if she knew, of the frenzied days of high energy, of the hues of dull afternoons and the dipping that followed inevitably. I was certain of being healthy, too certain, maybe just a bit afraid. Time would tell.

I have chosen to study memoirs that narrativize illness, memoirs of experiences that speak of illness. It seemed imperative to start with a short anecdote or a memoir moment of my own, before I traverse the revelatory and poignant accounts of health and illness that illuminate my work. The bravery of such accounts and the sheer boldness of the thematic as well as formal aspects seemed to generate the need fora closer reading and commentary. That the personal can be cast in the form that it does in a medical memoir, by challenging dominant perceptions about shame and secrecy and asking questions while inviting introspection on the part of its readers, is never something that can be assumed or taken as a given. This project is an inquiry into the nature of these endeavors, as well as the dialogue with medical science that these medical memoirs attempt.

Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unguiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness is an astute example of a memoir that situates a dialogue with medica] science and focuses on this thematically. In Jamison’s description of her first bout of manic depressive illness when she was a senior in high school, she writes thus:

In her introduction, Jamison writes that "the war I raged against myself is not an uncommon one." Yet, the writing that weaves between her manic highs and depressive lows and the stances that she chooses to share hold a unique place in the literature on manic depression. Upon reading Jamison’s writing, the questions that emerged for me were in relation to the visceral, descriptive, and gut-wrenching encounters with the illness and what they can do to enhance perceptions of the illness. Jamison captures the range of views held in relation to parenting and the genetic nature of manic-depressive illness that created the polarity of these views. Questions about this illness are visible in an alternate perspective in Linda Gray Sexton’s memoir, Searching for Mercy Street, which thematizes her relationship with her mother Anne Sexton, one of America’s greatest confessional poets.‘ The pervasive nature of bipolar disorder in a home, and on the mind of a young child, is hard to ignore in Linda Gray Sexton’s account:

Book's Contents and Sample Pages