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Article ID: CBB001320815

Imaginary Investments: Illness Narratives beyond the Gaze (2013)

Willis, Martin (Author)
Waddington, Keir (Author)
Marsden, Richard (Author)

Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 6, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 55-73
Publication date: 2013
Language: English

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Family Medicine and literature Disease and diseases Personal narratives Doctor-patient relationships Medicine and culture Patients Public understanding of medicine 20th century, late 21st century Beckett, Samuel Foucault, Michel

Samuel Beckett, in his partly-autobiographical novel, Murphy (1957), uses his narrator to describe a series of hospital encounters intended to uncover the medical condition underlying a cardiac complaint. Without success, he tells the reader, his irrational heart was inspected, palpated, auscultated, percussed, radiographed and cardiographed (3). Although Beckett would not have described Murphy as an illness narrative, he captures very accurately the dominant perspective on the history of the modern medical encounter. Murphy is subject to the objectifying gaze of medical professionals and their visual technologies while at the same time he is characterised as the irrational patient solely defined by his specific pathology. This positioning of medical authority and patient submission is precisely the totalizing relationship of the clinical gaze as determined by Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic. ....This article argues that the imaginary investments that Foucault so offhandedly rejected did not disappear into the imprisoning cavities of the human body to be made subject to the clinical gaze. By thinking about the narratives produced by family members -- actors beyond the binary of the doctor and patient -- it suggests these imaginary investments continued to perform their myth-making and imagining in disparate medical narratives which undermine the gaze's totality to consider illness narratives as writing and their contribution to both the historical record of illness and the literary canon of somatic fictions. Although these fugitive narratives, and their metaphors of resistance, have not previously been considered in medical humanities scholarship, their existence can be read as evidence of a continuing project of communal imaginative acts of history-making that offer an alternative to the present understanding of narrative praxis in the field. Just as Foucault examined third-person narratives -- the doctor's -- describing the medical encounter, this article explores a further set of third-person narratives -- that of the family member as carer -- commonly ignored in the medical humanities.

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