Illness as Narrative

Notes

133 Chapter 1. Illness Narratives and the Challenge to Criticism 1. See the following American histories of World War I, in which the influenza pandemic receives scant mention: Kennedy, Over Here; Zeiger, America’s Great War; Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America; and Morrow, The Great War. For a view of the significance of influenza in World War I, see Byerly, Fever of War. 2. Belling speculates in “Overwhelming the Medium” that “perhaps the flu overwhelmed language in ways that war did not” (57). Belling’s study focuses on fiction. Dolezal writes about the 1918 flu in Willa Cather’s One of Ours in “‘Waste in a Great Enterprise.’” 3. This literature, it should be noted, did not reflect the full spectrum of those who were sick or infected: the vast majority of memoirs and fiction that were published in the last decades of the twentieth century were by or about economically privileged gay men. Few published works appeared by intravenous drug users, the urban poor in the United States, or those from impoverished regions across the globe. 4. It is virtually impossible to track the total number of lay or literary texts published about particular diseases, but the searchable Modern Language International Bibliography provides rough data about the number of scholarly texts that have appeared about diseases such as influenza, cancer, and HIV/AIDS, as well as about disabilities. The Bibliography lists only 6 entries in English about influenza, 4 of which appeared between 2000 and 2007. There are 166 listings under “cancer”: only 2 appeared before 1980, and the numbers have been steadily increasing, from 24 in the 1980s, to 54 in the 1990s, and 86 between 2000 and 2008. For HIV/AIDS, by contrast, there are 713 listings, with the earliest in 1984. While only 27 articles related to AIDS appeared in the 1980s, 435 texts were published in the 1990s, and 250 between 2000 and 2008. Recently, the number of texts about disability have surpassed the number about HIV/AIDS. In the 1980s, 79 texts about disability appeared, with the earliest listing in 1980. This was followed by 192 published texts in the 1990s, and 438 between 2000 and 2008. notes 5. For critical overviews of the literary response to HIV/AIDS, see Brophy, Witnessing AIDS; Chambers, AIDS Writing and Facing It; Couser, Recovering Bodies; Kruger, AIDS Narratives; Murphy and Poirier, Writing AIDS; Nelson, AIDS; Pastore, Confronting AIDS. 6. See Nelson’s introduction to AIDS, in which he rejects comparisons to other literary traditions about suffering. Instead, he “insist[s] on the uniqueness of the literature of AIDS. AIDS writing is produced in response to a puzzling and unmanageable medical catastrophe, primarily by individuals on the sexual margins who have been most profoundly affected. It is a diverse body of literature that documents, disrupts, testifies, protests, even celebrates” (3). 7. Foundational texts about the importance of narratives about illness include: Brody, Stories of Sickness; Charon, Narrative Medicine; Frank, The Wounded Storyteller; A. H. Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness; Hunter, Doctors’ Stories; Kleinman, Illness Narratives; Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots. 8. See, for instance, Harrington, The Cure Within; D. B. Morris’s two books, The Culture of Pain and Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age; Mukhergee, The Emperor of All Maladies; Wald, Contagious. 9. Only in professional healthcare journals, particularly nursing journals, could one find personal accounts of the epidemic. See, for example, G. R., “Experiences during the Influenza Epidemic,” and Thorne, “Four Weeks of Influenza,” both of which appeared in the American Journal of Nursing. 10. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, published in German in 1924, would not appear in English translation for several years. 11. Examples include Bromberg, The Mind of Man; Ingram, “Encephalitis”; Aldrich, The Story of Burns; and Newsholme, Fifty Years in Public Health. 12. See Wilson, Living with Polio, which is based on 150 patient narratives, many of them book-length. Most of these were published in the 1950s through the early 1960s, following the worst years of the epidemic in the United States. 13. A representative sample of such texts includes Clarke, “Katherine Mansfield’s Illness ”; Keevil, “The Illness of Charles”; Waterlow, “Illness and Death of Mozart”; White, “The Last Illness of Major Walter Reed.” 14. Editor John H. Knowles entitled his 1977 book about the ambiguous achievements of the American healthcare system Doing Better and Feeling Worse. 15. For a rhetorical and sociological exploration of the emergence and evolution of Our Bodies, Ourselves, see Wells...