Resisting Attrition in Stories of Trauma

From my perspective as an oral historian who is interested in narratives of trauma, Rita Charon's essay prompts the reminder that memory is something that sets out to capture something else that is already lost. As I think about the project of telling in the profession of medicine, which seeks to repair that which may be already broken, it occurs to me: oral history does have a place at this grand table if in even a very humble way (stealing up to it as a service worker perhaps, an eavesdropper on what is being said, while refilling those great empty Jamesean cups). I am reminded of the paper a wonderful intellectual, Parita Mukta, recently presented at the meeting of the International Oral History Association in Rome entitled The Attrition of Memories: Ethics, Moralities and Futures. Attrition she defined as that process of friction or gradual wearing out that leads to a loss of feeling sorry for sin or contrition that is required for ethical life. The question she asked in her paper was why, with the rise of the spectacular media coverage of violence against ethnic groups in her own home country of India, and terrorism across the globe, is there an attrition of real understanding, communication, and sorrow over that which has been lost. She writes, "It is as if despite the most sophisticated and committed use of various media in exposing and laying bare the flagrant abuse of power by brutal governments, civic authorities and those often (faceless) murderers . . . there is both an overload of evidence testifying to the violence of the contemporary times that permeates all aspects of life, as well as a lack of knowledge of real suffering" (Mukta). Her purpose is to understand how the "attrition of memories" occurs, where the very heart of the communications revolution (and we might also say here, the technological revolution) generates friction and wears out the holding of memories, both in private and public worlds.

What Charon and her colleagues are exploring in the restitution of narrative to medicine is how that wearing out occurs, and how to restore the power of telling, and listening, to those who are captured together in the process of sharing and attempting to alleviate suffering. Before I visit the elegant concepts and stories that Charon has developed in her paper, I would like to tell a story about one of the projects in the Columbia archive that has explicitly addressed storytelling in medicine. In the 1990s Drs. Ronald Bayer and Gerald Oppenheimer jointly produced the Physicians and AIDS project, conducting 80 interviews that resulted in the award winning book, AIDS Doctors: Voices from the Epidemic. Initially, Bayer and Oppenheimer were going to document the epidemiology of the AIDS pandemic through interviews with leading AIDS doctors. The project changed, however, when Bayer and Oppenheimer realized that the doctors needed to share their personal stories and struggles, as they wrestled with the task of treating something that was first unknown, and then unthinkable. Bayer and Oppenheimer came to the Oral History Office to ask us what to do: they weren't getting the stories they expected and they were going to have to write a completely different book. But they quickly realized that the doctors' struggles were one significant story of the pandemic. Oral history made it possible for the long-repressed feelings of these healers who could not heal to emerge and be held in the form of narrative. These stories, the doctors told Bayer and Oppenheimer, were stories that they had never really told before. They often cried and felt great relief in the telling, and, in the process, they rebuilt the capacity to feel. I was inspired to tell this story in response to Charon's statement that medicine has been impoverished by the processes of positivism and reductionism, so much so that we can no longer "hear ourselves" think: so how can we then think of another?

Again, there is the idea: the project of memory...