Search Results

The final three chapter of the book consider the role of narrative in the patient's experience of hypochondria. Analysing a range of life-writing written by self-identified hypochondriacs, this chapter suggests that while narrativity is inherent in hypochondria, the condition also challenges the conventions of pathography, both because no “real” disease is found and because the patient-narrator is considered to lack credibility. What, then, in hypochondria, constitutes a “good story”?

Personal stories about depression and anti-depressants have become a ubiquitous facet of American culture. Such depression memoirs represent a crucial forum for grappling with the problem of suffering; they also illuminate the narrative templates people utilize in the face of depression. An analysis of the literature shows both the increasing salience of the biomedical model for depression, and also the various ways it is co-opted into the project of recasting the self in light of mental illness. Much as biomedical language runs through the pages of these memoirs, so do broader narrative templates, such as spiritual discovery and therapeutic self-reconstruction. Collectively, these narratives represent an enduring effort to find sense in suffering: to work with and around the biomedical model in order to find a place for depression in a meaningful self-narrative.

This chapter offers a reading of Heart of Darkness and ‘Outpost of Progress’ as belonging to a specific sub-genre of pathography, or illness narrative, which developed in the context of travel to the tropics. This subgenre is characterised by climatic disease worry and racial constitutionalism. The main white characters in Conrad’s fiction are highly susceptible to environmental influences, demonstrate poor judgement and also may have vulnerable underlying constitutions. Most are afraid of tropical illness and concerned to avoid it; nevertheless, all become seriously ill. Conrad implies that no measures can fully protect white travellers from the malignant quality of African heat and mist. By emphasising the omnipresence of these challenges, Conrad’s novella and short story throw the colonial project’s basic feasibility into doubt.

The final chapter closes the investigation of Livingstone’s legacy by extending analysis to the most recent biographical accounts of his life. Given metabiography’s insistence on the located nature of all biographical representation, even contemporary work cannot evade its analysis. Firstly, the focus is on the cultural phenomenon of debunking biography. While part of this re-evaluation has depended on important scholarly work, it also reflects a trend in biographical studies that has been aptly dubbed ‘pathography’. This term refers to the demythologising and excoriating approach that many biographers now take to their subject. Secondly, the chapter also investigates Livingstone’s place in ‘psychobiography’, a diagnostic form of life-writing in which the author plays analyst. For psychobiography, the biographee is less a subject for celebration than interrogation. Thirdly, the chapter investigates feminist biography, which has both reinterpreted Livingstone and recovered the story of his wife. In recuperating Mary, these works domesticate the hero while prioritising a marginalised subject. By surveying recent critical developments, the chapter argues that contemporary texts follow current biographical conventions and so cannot offer the conclusive word on Livingstone. While projecting themselves as definitive, these biographies are as ephemeral as those of the past.

Medical science believed that neurasthenia was just one of the early indications of a much larger problem negatively impacting civilized society. This new science was concerned with degeneration theory, which argued that if a species could evolve, then it could also devolve. Simply stated neurasthenia was one of the signs of an individual’s physical, moral and psychological devolution. Following a discussion of the science of degeneration, attention is given to literary decadence. Degeneration emerged as scientific theory, but was soon incorporated into legal, political and literary discourse. The idea of a nation in a state of decline coincided with other cultural trends which viewed the end of the nineteenth century in apocalyptic terms. This chapter explores the development of the scientific discourse in order to better understand the context for Andreev’s diagnosis and concentrates on the broad outlines of literary decadence in order to support the assertion that Andreev and his works share similarities with European decadence.

This chapter argues that some genres are more centrally concerned with the body than others, and that each genre exploits the affordances of its modes and media in unique ways. Thus, graphic illness narratives are characterized not only by their focus on the physical, social, and emotional impacts of disease, but also by their innovative use of the tools and materials of the comics medium, including inherent tensions between words and images, and between sequence and layout. These features impose particular constraints and offer unique opportunities to artists, influencing their choice of metaphors and the shape these metaphors take. For example, in many such works the expected direction of metaphorical transfer from sensorimotor experience to more abstract concepts is reversed, as the diseased body and the nature of visual perception are foregrounded in the artist’s consciousness.

The focus of this chapter is on nonmaleficence. Part one begins by providing an overview of the principle and then reviews a classic case in bioethics on abortion to illustrate how the principle is often understood. The discussion also draws on poetry to intimate that moral issues beyond decision-making are relevant to abortion. Part two offers a discussion of Heije Faber’s pastoral image of the circus clown to set the stage for opening up another way of looking at nonmaleficence. The essential feature of Faber’s image for the purposes of this chapter is that it provides a theological rationale for appreciating humor in the hospital. In part three, the author correlates nonmaleficence and the circus clown by using an essay by Sigmund Freud on humor to interpret select passages from scenes from two pathographies. The chapter argues that a pastoral perspective on nonmaleficence can help to mitigate harm stemming from idolatry.