Dearing, Stacey (Author)
Bross, Kristina (Advisor)
This dissertation investigates issues of patient agency in early American letters, diaries, missionary tracts, and medical treatises in order to analyze the ways individuals use writing and narrative strategies to shape and establish meaning for their medical experiences. While medicine and disease in early American literature have become increasingly popular fields of study, scholars limit their understanding of narrative medicine by exclusively employing presentist notions of agency; my project offers a literary history of the field of narrative medicine, thereby expanding considerations of patient agency to include texts written before the postmodern era. I argue that patients in the early Atlantic world employ narrative strategies across multiple genres in order to assert agency. If the sickroom was a marginalized space, then patients used writing to establish meaning for their conditions and to maintain connections with larger community networks. My analysis of early American medical narratives reveals alternate ways for understanding, constructing, and articulating power, authority, and knowledge through religious, scientific, and literary discourses. Throughout the project, I complicate and challenge constructions of disease and medicine/medical texts as scientific and therefore not literary. Awareness of historical context allows me to unpack the texts featured in my project in order to undo the notion of a scientific/literary binary and explore the fluid nature of the scientific literary spectrum. Rather than being in competition, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, medicine and literature were seen as mutually informative discourses, each offering unique methods and strategies for understanding, interpreting, and analyzing human experiences of illness. When we divide these fields, we risk missing important insights into the development of early Atlantic literature and sciences, and especially into the texts they produced.
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Book
Muriel R. Gillick;
(2017)
Old and Sick in America: The Journey through the Health Care System
(/isis/citation/CBB072704397/)
Article
Howard, Sharon;
(2003)
Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-Century Childbirth: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World
(/isis/citation/CBB000770501/)
Chapter
Hudson, Geoffrey L.;
(2007)
Arguing Disability: Ex-Servicemen's Own Stories in Early Modern England, 1590--1790
(/isis/citation/CBB000773390/)
Book
Carolin Schmitz;
(2018)
Los enfermos en la España barroca y el pluralismo médico : Espacios, estrategias y actitudes
(/isis/citation/CBB413794373/)
Book
Hannah Newton;
(2018)
Misery to Mirth: Recovery from Illness in Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB061787859/)
Article
Pardo-Tomás, José;
Martínez-Vidal, Àlvar;
(2008)
Stories of Disease Written by Patients and Lay Mediators in the Spanish Republic of Letters (1680--1720)
(/isis/citation/CBB001030666/)
Book
Mooij, Annet;
(2002)
Doctors of Amsterdam: Patient Care, Medical Training and Research (1650-2000)
(/isis/citation/CBB000771199/)
Article
He Bian;
(2017)
Documenting Medications: Patients’ Demand, Physicians’ Virtuosity, and Genre-Mixing of Prescription-Cases (Fang’an) in Seventeenth-Century China
(/isis/citation/CBB623547541/)
Book
Harold Y. Vanderpool;
(2015)
Palliative Care: The 400-Year Quest for a Good Death
(/isis/citation/CBB017328667/)
Book
Cerulli, Anthony Michael;
(2012)
Somatic Lessons: Narrating Patienthood and Illness in Indian Medical Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001214264/)
Article
Mariano Martini;
Brigo, Francesco;
Davide Orsini;
(2023)
Medical Humanities & Tuberculosis: Thinking with Stories during Recent Years
(/isis/citation/CBB682657467/)
Book
Ruisinger, Marion Maria;
(2008)
Patientenwege. Die Konsiliarkorrespondenz Lorenz Heisters (1683--1758) in der Trew-Sammlung Erlangen
(/isis/citation/CBB001022058/)
Book
Demaitre, Luke E.;
(2007)
Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body
(/isis/citation/CBB000773314/)
Thesis
Thompson, Catherine L.;
(2009)
“Dr. Greene Is Not God!”: Patient-Physicians Relations in Early America, 1750--1850
(/isis/citation/CBB001562849/)
Article
Tésio, Stéphanie;
(2007)
Exemples de relations praticiens-patients, Perche-Gouvernement de Québec: dettes pour frais médicaux, 1690--1740--1770
(/isis/citation/CBB000900120/)
Chapter
Maria Conforti;
(2021)
Fiducia per lettera: medici e pazienti nei consulti italiani tra tardo Seicento e primo Settecento
(/isis/citation/CBB648673124/)
Book
Silver, Julie K.;
Wilson, Daniel;
(2007)
Polio Voices: An Oral History from the American Polio Epidemics and Worldwide Eradication Efforts
(/isis/citation/CBB000830476/)
Article
Olivia Weisser;
(2017)
Treating the Secret Disease: Sex, Sin, and Authority in Eighteenth-Century Venereal Cases
(/isis/citation/CBB933055289/)
Book
Jennifer Evans;
Ciara Meehan;
(2017)
Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB741421082/)
Article
Kerrewin van Blanken;
(2020)
Earthquake Observations in the Age Before Lisbon: Eyewitness Observation and Earthquake Philosophy in the Royal Society, 1665–1755
(/isis/citation/CBB932259109/)
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