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This introduction gives an overview of recent scholarship in Romanticism and the medical humanities. It argues that medical humanists are indebted to a Romantic belief that literature cures by making people whole again—what this book calls therapeutic holism. After critiquing therapeutic holism for its limiting assumptions about selfhood and literature’s powers, the introduction offers an alternative in palliative poetics, a model for literary therapy grounded in Romantic writers’ affinity to Georgian medical ethics. It shows how this focus on ethics reorients Romantic scholarship on literature and medicine, which has mostly restricted its definition of medicine to medical science. Finally, this introduction outlines the book’s six chapters: two introductory chapters on the intellectual history of therapeutic holism and four single-author illustrations of palliative poetics.

Chapter five includes a discussion of specific curricular interventions that can work toward getting students to think critically and to reflect deeply and broadly on what it means to be human. It highlights pedagogical approaches that allow students to see that the “real” scientific facts of biological disease cannot be separated from the existential reality of illness and that human beings always already dwell within their lived experiences, even before science and medicine inscribe their particular, abstract truths onto the body. Through exposure to patients’ stories—whether through narratives or face-to-face encounters—reflective writing, dialogue, and quality mentorship, students might come to appreciate the lived experience of illness, to expand their moral imaginations, and to develop a more capacious sense of care that is grounded within a recognition of our shared humanness and potential for suffering. This kind of pedagogy does not result in a “professionalism” that can be measured, quantified, and assessed, but rather a way of being in the world—a posture of openness toward others, an ability to face uncertainty, and the capacity to extend care to all patients even when “nothing else can be done.”

This chapter returns to the narrative medicine methodology discussed in Chapter 2, elaborating upon the relationship between literature and medicine and proposing that metagnosis is the key to making a readerly/writerly diagnosis. As literary movements such as metafiction expose the fallacies and limitations of literary realism, metagnosis constructively exposes the representational practices of biomedicine. The confluence of metagnosis and metareferentiality is explored in the work of contemporary comedian Hannah Gadsby. In addition, the implications of metagnosis are shown to extend beyond the context of health and medicine to revelations concerning identity (e.g., Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance) and to the cultural discourse of identity writ large (e.g., Appiah, Haider, Zadie Smith). Understanding metagnosis as a revelation effecting a change in knowledge—and employing our blindsight to address the apparent binaries structuring our understanding—is integral to our understanding of ourselves and of identity itself as we move into an increasingly dynamic future.

In an essay entitled ‘Pathologies’ Jamie reflects on the role of the microscopic other in endangering human wellbeing and continuing life. This ‘inner natural world’ is both complex and contingent however; developments at the interface between creativity and technology have for some time problematized the concept of the body as singularly ‘human’ in character. Jamie’s engagement with the intricacy of bodily experience and representation, in particular with notions of the ‘other within’, is explored in a new way in a short sequence of poems published as This Weird Estate in 2007. These poems were written in response to anatomical representations of the early 19^th century, several of which relate specifically to reproductive disease; they consider this most proximate of encounters—that of the child in the womb with the body of the mother—as a site within which other forms of nature exert an invisible yet powerful force. This chapter situates these poems at the interface of the poet’s engagement with generational change and ecological responsibility.