Editor's Preface: Narrative, Memory, Rhetoric, and Resurrection

I thought of the bones in multiple myeloma: eaten away by the cancer until they're as brittle as Rice Krispies. In a few minutes the Man With Agonal Respirations would have a cardiac arrest. If Mickey tried to pump his chest, his bones would crunch into little bitty bits. Not even Mickey, seduced into the Leggo's philosophy of doing everything always for every patient forever, would dare call a cardiac arrest.

Mickey called a cardiac arrest. From all over the House, terns and residents stormed into the room to save the Man With Agonal Respirations from a painless peaceful death.

Samuel Shem, The House of God¹

… as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightenment of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

Albert Camus The Plague²

And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. "How good and how simple!" he thought. "And the pain?" he asked himself. "What has become of it? Where are you, pain?"

He turned his attention to it.

"Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be."

"And death … where is it?"

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death.

In place of death there was light.

"So that's what it is!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!"

Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilych³

The three epigraphs with which I begin offer a kind of literary triangle within which the essays and reviews in this issue of Literature and Medicine may be said to address the narrative, rhetorical, and symbolic complexities of illness, recovery, and mortality. Addressing those complexities, the essays offer no simple solutions to the demands of illness and the powers of medicine, but invite us to consider the many and often compromised roles narrative and silence, death and resurrection, memory and forgetting, power and influence have always played and continue to play in the lives of people who suffer the effects of both disease and doctoring, effects that are more fractal than linear, more often influenced by chance, belief, and circumstance than by reason, science, and control.

We begin with Kelly McGuire's remarkable essay titled "Raising the Dead: Sermons, Suicide, and Transnational Exchange in the Eighteenth Century." In this piece, McGuire takes us back to the late eighteenth century and introduces us to the Reverend William Dodd, one of the most important players in the formation of the "Society for the Resuscitation of the Persons Apparently Drowned," otherwise known as the British Humane Society, as he climbs the scaffold from which he was to be hanged. He hoped to be resuscitated and to thereby achieve the status of a "renovated being," free to resume his normal life, having paid his debt to society. McGuire's essay analyzes the complex rhetoric of the society and its struggles not only to determine the point at and the means by which life ends but also its attempts to define its work in narrative, legal, and spiritual terms that might allow that work to continue and to become a central part of the cultural and medical realities of the time. As McGuire puts it in her conclusion,

Beginning with William Dodd's paradigmatic sermon, the...