Project MUSE®: Literature and Medicine - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Literature and Medicine.daily12026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1982) through current issueLatest Articles: Literature and MedicineTWOProject MUSE®Literature and Medicine1080-65710278-9671Latest articles in Literature and Medicine. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor's Foreword
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975536
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The five contributions to this issue's Front Matter remind us that forgetting is never far from remembering. Details of an experience that took place years ago may not be easily accessible, but a hint of its consequences can suddenly emerge and resonate, as explored by Catherine Belling. Other hindrances to accessing a person, place, or thing may be biologically determined, such as when the memory of something cannot be retrieved by an aging brain. There is the fear of losing one's memory and with it a sense of self—a fear that may increase year by year. Some forgetting is heartbreaking, as in A. Emiko Blalock's tribute to her mother, who no longer recognizes her daughter. The details of past traumatic events can
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallEditor's Foreword2025-12-02text/htmlen-USEditor's Foreword2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®40202026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Forgetting Forwards: Film and the Weirdness of Trauma Research
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975537
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Film director Gaspar Noé recalled in an interview that "when I saw Straw Dogs by Sam Peckinpah, I walked out in the middle of the movie during the rape scene. … It took me 10 years to rewatch the movie."1 Noé's own film Irréversible (2002) contains a rape scene that may surpass Peckinpah's in the intensity of its effect on audiences. Asked why people remember the rape more than anything else in his film, he offers a preliminary trauma theory: "Violence generates adrenaline, and adrenaline fixes the memory. When people see a movie that contains moments of simulated violence, you'll have an adrenaline rush, and those memories are much more printed in your memory."2 Whether the violence is actual or simulated, then
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallForgetting Forwards: Film and the Weirdness of Trauma Research2025-12-02text/htmlen-USForgetting Forwards: Film and the Weirdness of Trauma Research2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®633842026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Everything's Racist MLK Day
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975538
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallEverything's Racist MLK Day2025-12-02text/htmlen-USEverything's Racist MLK Day2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®29662026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Not Remembering
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975539
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Traveling west to west to eastMethodology← →Longitudinality2025This study includes data from a four-year longitudinal exploration asking how women medical students are experiencing becoming doctors. Underpinning this work is a methodology of narrative research and longitudinal qualitative research. Narrative research centers relationships to elicit experiences through time. The strength of narrative research is its relationality, connecting personal histories to intertwine with a present shared experience thereby 'storying' the data into individual then collective narratives. Longitudinal qualitative research attends to time, a memory anchor I used to follow participants as they navigated their journey through four
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallNot Remembering2025-12-02text/htmlen-USNot Remembering2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®201982026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Remembering Reparations: A Journey Through Structural Violence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975540
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Growing up on the island of Jamaica, violence dominated the long summer nights, breaking through the ideal of paradise that touristic images projected. The sound of gunshots was alarming and created a sense of urgency to leave. My family and I immigrated to the United States, to the concrete streets of Brooklyn, NY, in 2002, when I was six years old. I remember walking off the plane and seeing snow for the first time. It was a cold night but I was mesmerized by this white stuff that fell from the sky and instantly melted on everything it touched, my jacket, my hands, and the tarmac.Living in poverty and climbing a mountain of stress that comes with navigating a new country, my family cut corners in our eating and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallRemembering Reparations: A Journey Through Structural Violence2025-12-02text/htmlen-USRemembering Reparations: A Journey Through Structural Violence2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®218602026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Robert, AIDS, and Infectious Sympathy: I Remember When There Was Nothing Medicine Could Do
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975541
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I have been rereading Charles Brockden Brown's early American novels Arthur Mervyn, Ormond, and Wieland. I had written about these books in my dissertation, in part because they enthralled me with their uncanny gothic techniques, triggering the sensations of embodied narrative. Brown had personal experience with yellow fever: He lived through the epidemic in New York City in 1798, when he and his roommate, Elihu Smith, a cherished friend, contracted the disease. Brown tenderly nursed his friend before Smith died of yellow fever. Brown then began to write about epidemics, turning to the story of the outbreak that had devastated Philadelphia years earlier, in 1793. He made it central to his fiction and philosophy by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallRobert, AIDS, and Infectious Sympathy: I Remember When There Was Nothing Medicine Could Do2025-12-02text/htmlen-USRobert, AIDS, and Infectious Sympathy: I Remember When There Was Nothing Medicine Could Do2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®226452026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Shame and Medicine: An Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975542
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"Shame," writes Elspeth Probyn, "is a painful thing to write about. It gets into your body. It gets to you."1 The biggest worries, she continues, are that you might not get your point across, may fail to do your topic justice, could be called a sham—in other words, that your own interest in a topic exceeds your capacity to write about it. "Simply put, it is the challenge of making the writing equal to the subject being written about."2 How much more so, when the subject of the writing is shame itself?There is now considerable evidence that shame, a painful feeling or experience of inadequacy, lessness, or negative judgment, plays a significant role in medical practice, from clinical encounters through medical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallShame and Medicine: An Introduction2025-12-02text/htmlen-USShame and Medicine: An Introduction2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®271912026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Shame, Enchantment, and the "There-ness" of Disability in The Secret Garden
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975543
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Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic children's novel of 1911—The Secret Garden—has been a repugnant object for contemporary scholars of disability studies because of the equivalence it draws between physical health, able embodiment, and morality.1 Colin Craven's miraculous recovery, enabled by the therapeutic properties of the garden and his cousin's refusal to collude with sycophantic doctors, straightens out his "crooked" body and renders him morally "upright" (226–27).2 Disabled embodiment is a state associated with not just physical, but also moral degeneration, in a way that resonates with the eugenicist cultural anxieties of the period.3 Yet, while this linguistic register of rectitude has been remarked upon
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallShame, Enchantment, and the "There-ness" of Disability in The Secret Garden2025-12-02text/htmlen-USShame, Enchantment, and the "There-ness" of Disability in The Secret Garden2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®896702026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Training through Shame: Affect and Temporality in Medical Education
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975544
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Emotion and time intertwine: the passage of time is felt, feelings grow over time, time slows feelings, feelings stop time. This article theorizes the relationship between one type of time (narrative time) and one strong emotion (shame) within the lived experience of individuals becoming physicians through medical training in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). In medical school and out, there is no one way to understand the relationship between time-as-feeling and emotion-as-time. Both time and shame are culturally and situationally specific, embodied, and subject to change. To understand the relationship is to attend to the gendered, racialized, and place-based realities of how people experience
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallTraining through Shame: Affect and Temporality in Medical Education2025-12-02text/htmlen-USTraining through Shame: Affect and Temporality in Medical Education2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®758592026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Towards a Theory of Unexplained Illness: Shame, Pride, and Johanna Hedva's "Sick Woman Theory"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975545
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This essay offers a reading of the productive absence of shame in the writings of genderqueer multidisciplinary performance artist and writer Johanna Hedva, most notably in their iconic essay "Sick Woman Theory," originally published online by MASK Magazine in January 2016. Hedva is chronically ill themselves and politicizes their illness against the backdrop of a capitalist ideology that invalidates and dismisses the lived experience of pain and suffering of people living with chronic conditions. "Sick Woman Theory" became a landmark text for disability activism in which chronic illness is reclaimed as a place of resistance. Hedva's affirmation of the "Sick Woman" offers a new form of political agency. This
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallTowards a Theory of Unexplained Illness: Shame, Pride, and Johanna Hedva's "Sick Woman Theory"2025-12-02text/htmlen-USTowards a Theory of Unexplained Illness: Shame, Pride, and Johanna Hedva's "Sick Woman Theory"2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®1236452026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02"A World of Unknowing": Facing Shame in Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975546
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In Autobiography of a Face (1994), poet Lucy Grealy describes briefly sharing a hospital room with a teenager named Michael. Although Michael is "only a year older" than the sixteen-year-old Grealy, he seems to "have lived a whole life already": as Grealy recalls, Michael had "dived off the top of a two-story building into a pool" and, "at the age of seventeen, was permanently paralyzed, all because of a stupid trick that took him ten seconds to perform."1 When Grealy asks him why he did it, Michael says he doesn't know: "'It was a friend's pool,' he said … as if that should somehow clarify the situation" (173). After she is discharged from the hospital, Grealy often thinks of Michael, wondering if he would "ever
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmall"A World of Unknowing": Facing Shame in Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face2025-12-02text/htmlen-US"A World of Unknowing": Facing Shame in Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®647652026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02The Transitivity of Shame: Richard Selzer's "Imelda"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975547
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In Richard Selzer's short story "Imelda," a doctor reflects on an incident that occurred when, during his residency, he accompanied a formidable American plastic surgeon to Honduras for charity work. Among the plethora of patients they encounter is Imelda, a girl with a cleft palate who at first struggles against the doctors' attempts to assess her, but in doing so evokes a promise from the plastic surgeon that he will fix her lip. As she is about to be operated upon, she suffers a fatal reaction to the anesthetic. The next day, when her brothers arrive to take her body home, the resident discovers that Imelda's palate has been repaired—the surgeon has gone into the morgue the night before and, alone, operated on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallThe Transitivity of Shame: Richard Selzer's "Imelda"2025-12-02text/htmlen-USThe Transitivity of Shame: Richard Selzer's "Imelda"2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®713552026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Shame, (In)visibility, and Ill Feelings
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975548
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My mother and I have symptoms of illness without any known cause—according them the status of feelings, confined to our bodies, or our sense of them as ill. Ill—bad, sick, wrong—is also how I learned to feel about my diagnosis. Those ill feelings were not really my own, but reflections of societal ones, which deemed people with ME/CFS as fakers, scroungers, lazy and privileged, and indeed all chronically ill and disabled people as less-thanhuman, deserving of fewer rights, less pay, and less security and care.This citation is taken from the first section of Alice Hattrick's Ill Feelings (2021), and it elucidates the dual meaning behind the text's cryptic title. Hattrick, and their mother, feel ill: they experience
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallShame, (In)visibility, and Ill Feelings2025-12-02text/htmlen-USShame, (In)visibility, and Ill Feelings2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®975232026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Less a Method than a Form: Repairing Shame and Illness in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Kate Zambreno
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975549
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There is nothing inherently shameful about illness, and yet shame attends many people's experiences of ill health and medical treatment. In this essay I explore how two memoirs, written two decades apart, aim to reinscribe the relationship between shame and illness and counter the sense of social judgment associated with certain diagnoses or experiences by structuring memoir as an address to an interlocutor, someone whose writing is integral to the production of these memoirs. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love (1999) stages her therapy, following a breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent depression, as a relational endeavor through the structural interpolation of her therapist's case notes. In To Write as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallLess a Method than a Form: Repairing Shame and Illness in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Kate Zambreno2025-12-02text/htmlen-USLess a Method than a Form: Repairing Shame and Illness in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Kate Zambreno2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®925502026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02It's Time to Talk About Abortion: Shame, Fiction, and Legislative Change in Western Europe
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975550
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There are few subjects on which bourgeois society displays greater hypocrisy; abortion is considered a revolting crime to which it is indecent even to refer.The language of abortion has long been shrouded in shame. Over the twentieth century, the word "abortion" itself was rarely used outside of medical contexts. Indeed, according to historian Barbara Brookes, "abortion was frequently referred to as the 'illegal operation' because it was the only operation specifically prohibited by statute law [in the United Kingdom]."1 In Italy and France, abortion also had a specific legal status, which prohibited the practice as well as the publicization of information on the subject in all forms of writing.2 In 1930, Italy
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallIt's Time to Talk About Abortion: Shame, Fiction, and Legislative Change in Western Europe2025-12-02text/htmlen-USIt's Time to Talk About Abortion: Shame, Fiction, and Legislative Change in Western Europe2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®851512026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02The Shame of Being Trans: Transgender Patients and Cisgender Doctors in U.S. Medical Dramas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975551
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A recent issue of the American Journal of Emergency Medicine asks, "Are Television Medical Dramas Bad for Our Image?," a concern which highlights how the medical community, as well as media and communication scholars alike, have been focused primarily on the genre's influence on the profession itself.1 Such a focus is not unexpected, given the genre's construction as an occupational procedural, where each episode introduces a fictional patient whose health issues showcase the complexity of the medical profession. Yet as scholarship on another type of procedural—crime drama—has revealed, the collective identity of characters based on gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. is just as influential to the audience's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallThe Shame of Being Trans: Transgender Patients and Cisgender Doctors in U.S. Medical Dramas2025-12-02text/htmlen-USThe Shame of Being Trans: Transgender Patients and Cisgender Doctors in U.S. Medical Dramas2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®1190552026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02Stories of Shame, Stories for Shame: Fiction and Self-harm
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975552
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The shameful nature of self-harm is often simply taken for granted. Philosopher Nancy Nyquist Potter confidently characterizes self-harm as "particularly secretive and shameful," more so than gambling or alcohol addiction.1 There is certainly ample confirmation that self-harm is considered by the general public to be shameful, and is at times experienced as shameful by those who practice it.2 Yet such research rarely explores the dimensions of self-harm's shamefulness; what, precisely, is shameful about self-harm?Amy Chandler has critiqued the overreliance on shame as an explanatory framework for self-harm, noting that it "closes down alternative explanations and experiences which might interpret the scars, wounds
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/118/image/coversmallStories of Shame, Stories for Shame: Fiction and Self-harm2025-12-02text/htmlen-USStories of Shame, Stories for Shame: Fiction and Self-harm2025-12-022025TWOProject MUSE®888072026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-12-02