A Change of Heart: The Paradigm of Regeneration in Medical and Religious Narrative

A CHANGE OF HEART: THE PARADIGM OF REGENERATION IN MEDICAL AND RELIGIOUS NARRATIVE ANNE HUNSAKER HAWKINS* Introduction "Sometimes I felt as if I were a visitor who had gone out of the world for awhile and come back. ... I knew I had seen something, been beyond myself, outside myself, in other dimensions. ... I was watching a new vision of life and myself ... it was as if I was seeing [the world] for the first time . . ." [1, pp. 123, 93, 122, 115]. This quotation might have been taken from an autobiographical description of religious conversion. Indeed , the theme of renewal—the "new vision of life and myself"— would seem to identify it as spiritual autobiography. But in fact the quotation is from a book about heart disease. Even the title of the book is ambiguous, for it seems to imply a religious content: Coming Back: One Man'sJourney to the Edge ofEternity and Spiritual Rediscovery. Like a conventional story of religious conversion, this book describes a critical turning point in a man's life where the ordinary world to which he "returns" after his symbolic journey into a different realm seems brighter and newer, where he must reevaluate the meaning of his life and the values by which he lives, where he is forced to change from one set ofbehaviors and attitudes to another. It is organized around what I will call the "regeneration paradigm"—the belief that it is possible to undergo a process of transformation so profound as to be experienced as a kind of death to the "old self" and rebirth to a new and very different self. Narratives about illness are a common phenomenon today. These books, which I call pathographies [2], are best-sellers in contemporary American culture. Martha Weinman Lear's Heartsounds [3], the story of The study of which this essay is a part has been supported by an ACLS grant. Graduate Liberal Studies Program, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut 06457.© 1990 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1-5982/90/3304-068 1$01 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 33, 4 ¦ Summer 1990 \ 547 her physician-husband's long illness and eventual death from heart disease , can be found on the supermarket shelf; Norman Cousins' Anatomy ofan Illness [4], an account of his successful recovery from a rare collagen disease using a fantastic therapy ofhis own invention, is another popular book that often accompanies an individual to the hospital, along with toothbrush and family photos. Why are these narratives of such compelling interest? One answer might point to the dominating presence of scientism in today's medical model: in response to this scientism, pathography can be seen as the voice of the patient asserting itself in a world where that voice is rarely heard and almost never counts. Is it possible that a highly respected hospital can be so deficient in patient care that needless suffering is caused by the indifference or incompetence of medical personnel? According to Heartsounds, this is what happened to Harold Lear. Is it possible to disregard conventional medical advice and recover from a severe illness by generous doses of laughter and vitamin C? In Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins assures us that he did. This particular explanation as to why these narratives are so popular today points to a culture-bound dimension of illness—the medical model within which it is treated. But a different response directs us to elements in pathography that go beyond particulars of culture and era. It is this emphasis, the transcultural rather than the culture bound, that I will be concerned with here. A different reason, then, is that pathographies such as Heartsounds or Anatomy of an Illness describe dramatic human experience of real crisis: they appeal to us because they give shape to our deepest hopes and fears about such crises, and, in so doing, they draw on profound archetypal dimensions of human experience. But if this is so, one might wonder why it is that pathographies are not more in evidence in previous eras and cultures. For it would appear that pathography belongs almost exclusively to the latter part of the twentieth century: narratives about illness are...