Thesis ID: CBB304345111

Providential Narratives and Remarkable Bodies: Illness and Disability in Early America, 1650-1776 (2018)

unapi

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.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB304345111/

Similar Citations

Book Muriel R. Gillick; (2017)
Old and Sick in America: The Journey through the Health Care System (/isis/citation/CBB072704397/)

Chapter Hudson, Geoffrey L.; (2007)
Arguing Disability: Ex-Servicemen's Own Stories in Early Modern England, 1590--1790 (/isis/citation/CBB000773390/)

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/)

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/)

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/)

Authors & Contributors
Evans, Jennifer
Meehan, Ciara
Blanken, Kerrewin van
Brigo, Francesco
Schmitz, Carolin
Martini, Mariano
Concepts
Medicine
Patients
Personal narratives
Physicians; doctors
Doctor-patient relationships
Disease and diseases
Time Periods
18th century
17th century
20th century
19th century
16th century
Medieval
Places
United States
England
Spain
Québec (Canada)
Netherlands
Germany
Institutions
Royal Society of London
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment